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How did communism evolve over until its collapse?

Question by Kinnon: How did communism evolve over the years until its collapse?
The timeline i want to focus on is mostly, Karl Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and then everyone else until its collapse

Answers and Views:

Answer by Flashing Fingers
The masses needed a leader or control
Communism was invented
Democracy was invented (both, about the same time)
Prior to democracy, Imperialism(King or Queen) controlled the masses
Prior to Imperialism, the big strong guy was the boss
All use different methods to control the masses
Communism just died in Russia. Still alive in Cuba and in China and some other countries.
Use Google if you want book answers.

Answer by imperialpoetpurple
It never collapsed. The Russian Federation is represented by a multiparty system of about 40 political parties. The communist and socialist parties there receive on average 20-35% of the vote.
Belarus and Moldova have cp majorities, and much of Europe has socialist majority governments.

The largest political party in the world is the Chinese Communist Party.
The largest political organization in the world is the Socialist International.
For example, the British Labor Party and Democratic Socialists of America are
members of the Socialist International.

Communism/Socialism goes back to at least the days of the French Revolution, and Marx is one stream of that river… It’s a very long history, and your question does not reflect the scope of a suitable answer…because you present a timeline of over 100 years…

Also Vietnam, Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Brazil have vibrant socialist/communist parties…as well as many other countries in S.America, but there has been much oppression there also by the USA. The recent female president of Brazil was a comrade/friend of Ernesto Guevara.

France , Britain, Canada, Hungary, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Norway , Sweden, Iceland…and other nations have had socialist governments, and at least half of the above nations still do at this time, and the others have them as major parties at this time. Also the Russian Federation was born out of the USSR – not the USA. The USSR already deStalinized itself and had discussed deBolshevikization for many years.

Answer by Spellbound
Communism evolved very little over the 70 years of the USSR. The main changes were implemented by Lenin, and then Stalin, with subsequent leaders only altering minor parts of the state ideology.

Marxism-Leninism is (very simply) the belief that the state should own all the means of production, that the workers should be led by a “vanguard “party (a party of intellectuals who understand the proletariat’s class-consciousness”), that the workers and peasants are the revolutionary classes, and, most importantly, that Marx’s “historical phases of history” can be shortened – “telescoped” as Lenin put it.

Stalinism is the addition to these several political and economic features:
1) Marxism-Leninism is an internationalist ideology, it believes that the communist revolution is inevitable, and once it has happened in one country, then others will soon have their own revolutions – and so it was their duty to try to export the revolution. Stalin disagreed, he wanted to consolidate the revolution, so he began the policy of “Socialism in One Country”.
2) Stalinist economics called for the farms to be amalgamated into collective farms and the farmers to become agrarian workers. It also calls for all economic activity to be owned and controlled by the state through a centrally devised Five Year Plans worked out through the state planning agency – Gosplan. The state’s industrial focus became heavy industry – mining, iron and steel production and ship building.
3) Another feature that marks Stalinism out from other kinds of socialism and communism is the gross exaggeration of the leader – the “Cult of the Individual” as Khrushchev called it, or the “Cult of the Personality” as it is better known in the West. This cult saw Stalin elevated as a kind of demi-god, his every word was almost sacred. He was portrayed as the wisest, most benevolent and courageous person – a new kind of person – Homo Sovieticus. His image was everywhere, like a modern day religious icon, and he was shown explaining complex engineering, agricultural or military leaders.
4) But the most destructive feature of Stalinism is the idea that the class struggle intensifies after the revolution. This meant that the party sought out enemies in its own ranks and in wider society – this led directly to the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s – the Holodomor, to the Great Purge of the late 1930s and to the creation of the paranoid police state where neighbour informed on neighbour, husbands informed on wives and children informed on their parents – millions died, either shot (some 650,000) or from disease, famine, neglect or overwork (between 8 – 15 million).

Khrushchev removed several of these features when he took office: he got rid of the cult of personality that surrounded Stalin, removing images of him, having towns and cities remove reference to him in their names (notably Stalingrad becoming Volgograd).
And he liberalised, relaxing censorship, but his greatest departure from Stalinism was that he closed the Gulag, removing terror from the political system.

However, he did allow a degree of cult of personality to be built up around him and the rest of the system Stalin put in place remained.

Brezhnev’s era can be regarded as Stalinism ‘lite’. It was Stalinism but without the murderous repression. Andropov and Chernenko did not live long enough to make any significant changes to the country.
Gorbachev attempted to revise the system, to re-create a form of Leninist government and economy, and this led to the collapse.

See:
Stalinism and After – Alec Nove
Stalin, A Biography – Robert Service

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