Word: leninism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Stalin - so runs the misconception - has no ideological blueprint. With Lenin dead, he ditched all such nonsense. In his dealings with the world, he has gone this way and that. In the first years of the New Deal, Stalin and his Communists denounced the New Dealers as "social fascists." Then came the United Front : everybody who was against Hitler was a Progressive. Next, the Stalin-Hitler axis, which touched off the war. The war was an Imperialist War until Russia got in; then it was a People's War. After V-E day the Western nations were no longer...
...bedrock of Stalin's theory is Leninist-Marxism, and is known technically in the trade as "dialectical, historical materialism. "It is not new or secret, but it is what, in large measure, makes Stalin Stalin. Much of it was originated by Marx, modified by Lenin and picked up by Stalin. Since Stalin is the living actor on the stage, Historicus for convenience labels any of the theory Stalin consistently quotes as Stalin's theory.* All of Historicus' argument is based on Stalin's words, with Stalin's emphasis, not on the words of Marx...
Such a crisis, according to the old Marxists, would bring on an internal revolutionary situation in each of the countries independently, depending on how advanced was the stage of capitalism. It was Lenin who broke away from Marx's idea of the revolutionary process operating all by itself in each country. Lenin deduced, contrary to Marx, that the series of Communist revolutions might start in a backward country, rather than in an advanced country. Lenin, justifying the un-Marxian revolution in slowpoke Russia, called this a "break" in the world front...
Since World War I, Stalin (following Lenin) has come to believe that the flowing of the contradictions means, not the classical revolutions, but war first, followed by revolutions. Says Historicus: "In Stalin's thinking, the importance of war as a midwife of revolution can scarcely be exaggerated." War, Stalin says, develops a "weak link" in the imperialist-capitalist chain...
Stalin says, in effect, that the automatic blossoming of revolution is fine, but that many a near-revolution will fail if there is not a trained, hardheaded, ruthless organization which can, at just the right moment, topple the edifice. Here is where Stalin, along with Lenin, battles the ultra-leftists in the Marxist movement as well as the weak rightists for relaxing and pinning their hope for revolution on objective factors...