Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Communism has been profoundly impacted by the policies and perspectives of Joseph Stalin–particularly what some scholars have identified as the sweeping “revolution from above” that he initiated in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the 1930s Stalin had become the undisputed leader of the USSR and of the mainstream world communist movement. He identified his authoritarian and often brutal policies, and the ideology justifying those policies, with the legacy of Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin –in fact, he and his followers labeled their ideology “Marxism-Leninism.” Stalin established what some scholars have labeled a totalitarian regime–one in which a single monolithic party, utilizing the new technologies of the twentieth century, sought to control all aspects of political, economic, social, and cultural life through the use of terror, repression, and enforced ideological conformity. In the minds of many people communism consequently has become synonymous with this conception of totalitarianism. The Russian Revolution of 1917 , out of which the USSR eventually emerged, had held out the promise of “the toiling masses”–the working class and the peasantry, symbolized by the hammer and the sickle–jointly owning and controlling society's resources for the benefit of all, a radical democracy creating a society of the free and the ... log in or subscribe to read full text