Stalinism - Legacy

Legacy

After Stalin's death in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev repudiated his policies, condemned Stalin's cult of personality in his Secret Speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, and instituted destalinisation and relative liberalisation (within the same political framework). Consequently, most of the world's Communist parties, who previously adhered to Stalinism, abandoned it and, to a greater or lesser degree, adopted the positions of Khrushchev.

A few of the notable exceptions were North Korea under Kim Il-sung, the People's Republic of China, under Mao Zedong, the Albanian Party of Labour under Enver Hoxha, the Communist Party of Indonesia, certain sections of the Communist Party of Vietnam, and the Communist Party of New Zealand. In countries where the local Communist Party sided with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) under the leadership of Khrushchev, various groupings of dissident party members left to begin pre-party formations based on their specific interpretations of Marxism-Leninism. This process accelerated as the 1960s progressed into the 1970s, eventually leading to what was called the New Communist Movement in various countries.

For example, in the United States the New Communist Movement led to a plethora of formations, among them the Progressive Labour Party, the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and the October League, amongst others. Kim simply purged the North Korean Communist party of de-Stalinisation advocates, either executing them or forcing them into exile or labour camps. Under Mao, the People's Republic grew antagonistic towards what they saw as the new Soviet leadership's "revisionism", resulting in the Sino-Soviet Split in 1960. Subsequently, China independently pursued the ideology of Maoism, which still largely supported the legacy of Stalin and his policies.

The Socialist People's Republic of Albania took the Chinese party's side in the Sino-Soviet Split and remained committed, at least theoretically, to Hoxhaism, its brand of Stalinism, for decades thereafter, under the leadership of Enver Hoxha. Despite their initial cooperation against "revisionism," Hoxha denounced Mao as a revisionist, along with almost every other self-identified Communist organization in the world. This had the effect of isolating Albania from the rest of the world, as Hoxha was hostile to both the pro-USA and pro-Soviet spheres of influence, as well as the Non-Aligned Movement under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito, whom Hoxha had also denounced.

The ousting of Khrushchev in 1964 by his former party-state allies has been described as a Stalinist restoration by some, epitomised by the Brezhnev Doctrine and the apparatchik/nomenklatura "stability of cadres," lasting until the period of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s and the fall of the Soviet Union.

Some historians and writers (like German Dietrich Schwanitz) draw parallels between Stalinism and the economic policy of Tsar Peter the Great, although Schwanitz in particular views Stalin as "a monstrous reincarnation" of him. Both men wanted Russia to leave the western European states far behind in terms of development. Both largely succeeded, turning Russia into Europe's leading power. Others compare Stalin with Ivan the Terrible because of his policies of oprichnina and restriction of the liberties of common people.

Some analysts like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Mortal Danger: Misconceptions about Soviet Russia and the Threat to America consider the use of the term "Stalinism" is an excuse to hide the inevitable effects of communism as a whole on human liberties. He writes that the concept of Stalinism was developed after 1956 by western intellectuals so as to be able to keep alive the communist ideal. The term "Stalinism" however was in use as early as 1937 when Leon Trotsky wrote his pamphlet "Stalinism and Bolshevism".