Stalinism - Relationship To Leninism

Relationship To Leninism

The historiography of Stalin is diverse, with many different aspects of continuity and discontinuity between the regimes of Stalin and Lenin proposed. Totalitarian historians such as Richard Pipes tend to see Stalinism as the natural consequence of Leninism, that Stalin "faithfully implemented Lenin's domestic and foreign policy programmes". More nuanced versions of this general view are to be found in the works of other Western historians, such as Robert Service, who notes that "institutionally and ideologically, Lenin laid the foundations for a Stalin... but the passage from Leninism to the worse terrors of Stalinism was not smooth and inevitable." Likewise, historian Edvard Radzinsky believes that Stalin was a real follower of Lenin, exactly as he claimed himself.

Proponents of continuity cite a variety of contributory factors: it is argued that it was Lenin, rather than Stalin, whose civil war measures introduced the Red Terror with its hostage taking and internment camps, that it was Lenin who developed the infamous Article 58, and who established the autocratic system within the Communist Party. They also note that Lenin put a ban on factions within the Russian Communist Party and introduced the one-party state in 1921 - a move that enabled Stalin to get rid of his rivals easily after Lenin's death, and cite Felix Dzerzhinsky, who, during the Bolshevik struggle against opponents in the Russian Civil War, exclaimed "We stand for organised terror – this should be frankly stated".

Opponents of this view include revisionist historians and a number of post–Cold War and otherwise dissident Soviet historians including Roy Medvedev, who argues that although "one could list the various measures carried out by Stalin that were actually a continuation of anti-democratic trends and measures implemented under Lenin... in so many ways, Stalin acted, not in line with Lenin's clear instructions, but in defiance of them". In doing so, some historians have tried to distance Stalinism from Leninism in order to undermine the Totalitarian view that the negative facets of Stalin (terror, etc.) were inherent in Communism from the start. Critics of this kind include anti-Stalinist communists such as Leon Trotsky, who pointed out that Lenin attempted to persuade the CPSU to remove Stalin from his post as its General Secretary. Lenin's Testament, the document which contained this order, was suppressed after Lenin's death. British historian Isaac Deutscher, in his biography of Trotsky, says that on being faced with the evidence "only the blind and the deaf could be unaware of the contrast between Stalinism and Leninism". A similar analysis is present in more recent works, such as those of Graeme Gill, who argues that " not a natural flow-on of earlier developments; sharp break resulting from conscious decisions by leading political actors."