he was a total dictator, whose paranoia led to a huge bloodletting in countless
purges of party, military and administrative leaders. The estimates of death
resulting from his reign have been put as high as 20 million, and the major
source of his power was his use of the secret police, especially the NKVD,
later renamed as the KGB (seepolice state). His main policies were to force
the collectivizationof agriculture, this itself meaning the forced mass
migration of millions of peasants, and death for many of those who resisted,
and the development of heavy industry at the expense of immediate living
standards. He controlled the whole social, economic and cultural world in the
Soviet Union brutally and totally. His major motivation seems to have been a
desperate fear for the security of the revolutionary society once it became
apparent that other Western societies were not likely to follow the revolu-
tionary path; indeed he transformed the originally internationalist orientation
of Soviet theory, enunciating his own doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’
as early as 1924. This led to his trying to arrange an anti-capitalist mutual
protection treaty withHitler, though on Germany’s invasion of the Soviet
Union in 1941 Stalin’s energies and efforts led to a costly but ultimately
successful war effort, and the acquisition of most of Eastern Europe as a
Soviet ‘empire’.
Stalinism
Stalinism is a word used to describe a particular brand ofcommunism, often
used of European communists or communist parties. It means the most hard-
line, inflexible and undemocratic version of Marxist-Leninism, and is
associated with the style of policy and practice adopted by the Soviet ruler
JosephStalinin the 1930s and 1940s. Stalinism places particularly heavy stress
on the duty of rank-and-file members of communist movements to obey the
hierarchy, denounces internal debate and, until the 1980s, demanded the
strictest adherence to the Soviet line in any policy. Unquestioning support
for the leadership, and the total denial of the possibility of a non-revolutionary
road to socialism, were parts of the Stalinist’s position. For most of the post-war
period theParti Communiste Franc ̧aiswas seen as especially Stalinist, in
contrast, for example, to theEurocommunismof the Italian communist
party. The concept is also used of the formerly Soviet-dominated Eastern
European states, where relatively ‘liberal’societies like, for example, Yugoslavia
or Czechoslovakia (before 1968), were contrasted with the more ‘Stalinist’
regimes in East Germany and, at one time, Poland. The term is sometimes used
as a figurative description for anyone who wields political authority in a
particularly heavy-handed way, with intolerance of debate or dissension.
Stalinism