What were two ideas developed by Joseph Stalin?

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1. Spellbound says

   Stalinism is the addition of several factors to Marxism-Leninism.

   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.

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

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