Stalinism

Stalinism, pejorative term used by opponents of Joseph Stalin, usually those on the political left, to characterize the most authoritarian features of Soviet Communism: rule by the bureaucracy, arbitrary use of mass repression, an exaggerated and at times grotesque personality cult, the execution of political enemies. By extension, the term has also been used to denote left-wing dictatorships exhibiting some of these features; for instance, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Romania under Nicolae Ceauşescu, and North Korea under Kim Il Sung.

In the final years of Stalin's life, Stalinism became akin to a state religion as it sought to determine developments in the arts (socialist realism), in the social sciences, including linguistics, and in the natural sciences, especially genetics (regarding the work of Trofim Lysenko). Stalinism is more generally associated with the assertion (challenged by Leon Trotsky) that—in spite of the hostility of surrounding capitalist countries—it was possible to construct “socialism in one country”. This enabled Soviet Communists to appeal to national Russian pride while revolutionaries abroad were expected to give priority to the defence of the “Motherland of socialism”.

The term can also be used to describe the Soviet model of transition to socialism: a command economy giving priority to capital goods, the forcible and rapid collectivization of agriculture, the emphasis on a “revolution from above” conducted with military sternness, and the insistence on the rapidity of modernization regardless of the human cost involved.

Finally, the term is used to characterize Communists who followed the Soviet model in a zealous and unquestioning way. This was considered an obligation on all Communists while Stalin was alive, but the term continued to be used even when Stalinism itself had been denounced in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1956 by Nikita Khrushchev at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party. Since then it has been applied to those who oppose all attempts to modernize, revise, or reform Communism.