The Stalinism reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004
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Stalinism

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Stalinism is a colloquial term for the political and economic system implemented by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union. Hannah Arendt described the system as totalitarian and this description has become is widely used by critics of Stalnism.

The term was also used to denote a brand of communism and socialism theory, usually used in the compound term Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, or teachings of Marx/Engels/Lenin/Stalin. Compare Maoism''.

The cornerstones of Stalin's theory were:

The term "Stalinism" was used by anti-Soviet Marxists, particularly Trotskyists, to distinguish the policies of the Soviet Union from those they regard as more true to Marxism. Trotskyists argue that the Stalinist USSR was not socialist, but a bureaucratized degenerated workers state that is, a state in which exploitation is controlled by a ruling caste which, while it did not own the means of production and was not a social class in its own right, accrued benefits and privileges at the expense of the working class.

Building on Lenin's work, Stalin expanded the centralized bureaucratic system of the Soviet Union during the 1930s. A series of two five-year plans led to a massive expansion of the Soviet economy. Large increases were seen in many sectors, especially coal and iron production. Society was brought from a position decades behind the West to one of near economic and scientific equality within thirty years. Some economic historians now believe it to be the fastest economic growth ever achieved, even though it came at the cost of millions of lives through forced labor and the mass murder of Stalin's opponents.

After Stalin's death in 1953, Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev repudiated his policies and condemned Stalin's cult of personality at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 and instituted a process of destalinization and minor liberalisation. Only after that both the people of the USSR and the rest of the world have slowly become aware what really happened during Stalin's rule. See Gulag and articles.

Some historians draw parallels between Stalinism and the economic policy of Tsar Peter the Great. Both men desperately wanted Russia to catch up to the western European states. Both succeeded to an extent, turning Russia temporarily into Europe's leading power.

After destalinisation in the Soviet Union and other countries in the Soviet bloc in the 1950s and 1960s and with the People's Republic of China's move away from Maoism after 1976, the only states which remained truly Stalinist were Albania and North Korea (though some would add Ceausescu's Romania to the list. Of those regimes only North Korea, under the rule of the Korean Workers Party, remains Stalinist into the twenty first century. However several of the former Soviet republics, particularly Belarus and Tajikistan have reverted to some Stalinist forms such as the cult of personality and extensive use of secret police.

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