МАЯХ "GORBACHEV'S GOING TOO FAST! " defend socialist revolutionary struggles elsewhere, Stalin stressed the duty of revolutionaries to subordinate their struggle to defence of the USSR.
Under Stalin the Communist Parties became an instrument of Soviet foreign policy, courting 'influential' reformist and even bourgeois leaders - including the British TUC prior to 1926 and Chiang Kai Shek in China.
Gag opponents
To gag Leon Trotsky and other defenders of Leninist principles, Stalin led a crackdown and bureaucratisation of the CPSU. A ban on internal factions, (mistakenly) introduced as a temporary emergency measure at the height of the civil war, was used to gag all internal debate: democratic centralism was extinguished, ability of the Party to correct its errors through open criticism was eradicated.
Stalin also rejected Lenin's clear class analysis of the peasantry as a laver of small property owners: instead at first he believed them to be the leading force in the revolution, increasing the concessions made to them under the New Economic Policy.
MARTETIE Only when it became inescapably obvious that these measures were recreating a burgeoning new capitalist class did Stalin abruptly and brutally switch course. His bloody turn to forced collectivisation and crash industrialisation was then dressed up in frenzied sectarian Pronouncements of a new Third Period' of class war. This disorientated the entire Communist International, precipitating the fatal divisions in the German workers' move ment that opened the door for Hitler in 1933.
On every level Stalin represented not the continuation but the antithesis of Leninism. In consolidating his grip on the Party and state apparatus, and transforming Lenin's party into a monolithic parody of itself he was forced to wipe out every vestige of Leninist tradition, even while he erected a facade of statues and paid empty homage to the dead revolutionare should shed no tears as the masses today in eastern Europe uproot many of these monuments Stalin's hypocrisy. But the fight must begin anew for these and other workers to learn the real strengths of Leninism.