Stalinism

Origins and Characteristics

By the beginning of the 20th century, the spontaneous development of European countries and their overseas colonies extended over great expanses and held sway over civilizations and cultures hardly ready to adjust to the modes and models of modern behavior. The world became integrated into a single interstate system of territorial rule that was internally divided by imperialist rivalry and structural disproportions. Political leaders had no institutional and intellectual resources to manage such development even on national levels, to say nothing of an international one. The worldwide expansion of modernization coupled with the imperialist enclosure of the entire surface of the globe into a single interstate system made the issue of control of development critical. The inability to adequately respond to that great challenge provoked World War I.

Postwar reconstruction implied a grand project to meet the challenge. The Entente winners relied on national self-determination and the creation of a universal quasi polity in the form of the League of Nations. This project proved too simplistic and straightforward, however, to be adequate. It immediately provoked an alternative one. During World War I, radical Marxists had called for transforming an imperialist war into a world revolution through a series of civil wars. The October Revolution and the civil war that followed seemed to prove the underlying logic. Thus, Soviet power and the Comintern emerged as an alternative grand project. This was the historical context for the first wave of democratization and the Soviet experiment that evolved into Stalinism, as well as for a number of national alternative projects that produced a variety of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.

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