What was Stalinism?

[EsoognomEhT]

Wellll?
What's your take on Stalinism? How do you define it?
Are you a structualist?

Was it the logical continuation of leninism?

;d

[StukaJr]

Stalinism is a present tense - Stalinism is the cult of Stalin, obviously after his death, guided by belief that his actions were for the good of the nation and its people... Stalinists are a minority and gained most voice and followers after in the late 80's and early 90's - partially due to Glasnost but also when the new "democratic" nation turned its back on its elderly and let the nation go to thieves and chaos...

[Kilgor]

Its stalin's interpretation of marxism, with the emphasis on heavy industry and ruthless authoritianism.

[alexz]

I tought of an old joke about the soviet times.

A Frenchman, Englishman and a Russian were asked what is happiness?

The Frenchmen said, happiness is having a wild one night stand with a
beatiful woman and then necer seeing her again.
The Englishman said, Happiness is drinking a hot tea at home, on a
cold rainy day.
The Russian said, Happiness is when there are nocks on your door at 3 A.M.
and men in uniform say "Boris come with us" and you say "Boris lives in apartment across".

[chas]

Im gonna wait to see how many people say Stalin was real socialist, Marx really wanted all the suffering that son of a biatch caused and that they saw a lot of Stalinists the other day "cause them had them bloody SU flags and they were protesting war, wich means they were left, and Stalin was left, so obviously..."

[vryhpyammoadded]

Stalinism has little to do with political philosophy, least of all communism although; the public’s popular belief in the revolution is cultivated as a control for exploitation.
Stalinism is simply a method of rule by a centralized, authoritarian faction with a brutal dictator at its lead who demands total subservience of all his resources. I say resources because a Stalinist doesn’t see people; they see only parts in the machine they control.

Was it a logical continuation of Lenin? Concerning Lenin’s philosophy I’d say no with Trotsky being closer to it but Stalin took care of him well enough. As a strictly political Russian continuation of Lenin, I’d say yes. I don’t think Lenin could sustain the vast Soviet population on revolution alone. It took a beast like Stalin to maintain the national identity coherent, focused and working like slaves to drag, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century in such a short time.