Stalinism

Stalinism refers to the political system and doctrine that took shape in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, who led the Soviet Communist Party from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. Stalin presented his ideas as the faithful continuation of Marx and Lenin, codified as Marxism-Leninism. Historians generally use the term Stalinism for the specific features of his rule: a fully state-owned and centrally planned economy, rapid forced industrialization, the collectivization of agriculture, a cult of personality around the leader, and the use of mass terror against real and imagined opponents. This page describes it historically.

After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin defeated rivals including Leon Trotsky, and by 1929 he dominated the party. He promoted the idea of socialism in one country against Trotsky's emphasis on international revolution. The first five-year plan began in 1928 and pushed heavy industry at great speed. Collectivization deprived millions of peasants, labeled kulaks, of their farms, and many were shot or sent to labor camps. The famine of 1932 to 1933, which hit Ukraine especially hard, killed several million people. In the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938, show trials and mass arrests led to hundreds of thousands of executions, and the Gulag labor camp system held millions of prisoners. After the Second World War, Soviet-backed communist regimes were installed across Eastern Europe. In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes in his secret speech, beginning de-Stalinization.

Outside the Soviet Union, Stalinist models were applied in Eastern Europe after 1945, in Mongolia, and in the early years of communist rule in China and North Korea. In Albania, Enver Hoxha kept a strict Stalinist line after other states abandoned it, a current sometimes called Hoxhaism. Some communist parties and groups today still defend Stalin's record, while most communist parties formally accepted de-Stalinization.

Historians document the human cost of Stalinism, including deaths from famine, executions, deportations and labor camps that are usually estimated in the millions. Liberal and conservative critics describe the system as totalitarian, pointing to the absence of free elections, a free press or independent courts. Trotskyists and other critics on the left argue that Stalin created a privileged bureaucracy and betrayed the workers' revolution. Economists credit the system with rapid growth in heavy industry but point to chronic shortages, low agricultural output and poor quality consumer goods.

The Stalinist model shaped the Soviet Union from about 1929 to 1953 and was exported to many communist states. It turned the country into a major industrial and military power that played a central role in defeating Nazi Germany, at enormous human cost. After 1956 most communist states moved away from mass terror and the leader cult, though central planning and one-party rule largely remained until the late 1980s.