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— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

Marxism–Leninism

~8 min read · Ch. 1 of 7
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  • Marxism-Leninism, the ideology that once governed at least one-third of the world's population, began not with Marx or Lenin but with a man who outlived them both. Joseph Stalin shaped it in the Soviet Union during the 1920s, borrowing from the revolutionary writings of Karl Marx and the practical statecraft of Vladimir Lenin, then fusing them into something distinctly his own. By the height of the Cold War, this ideology had become the official doctrine of communist governments stretching from Havana to Hanoi, from Moscow to Ulaanbaatar. Today it remains the formal governing ideology of China, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. The question the rest of this documentary asks is: how did a synthesis assembled by one man in one country come to reshape so much of the planet? And what happened to it when its architects were gone?

  • The Bolshevik Party lost the 1917 Russian Constituent Assembly election, taking only 23.3% of the vote, against the Socialist Revolutionary Party's 37.6%. Within weeks, on the 6th of January 1918, the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets dissolved the assembly entirely. Lenin, who had previously supported multi-party free elections, then began calling the assembly a "deceptive form of bourgeois-democratic parliamentarism." That pivot - from supporting democratic participation to denouncing it - captured the tension at the heart of what would become Marxism-Leninism.

    The Bolsheviks had first tried and failed to seize power during the February Revolution of 1905, which ran from the 22nd of January 1905 to the 16th of June 1907. The killings on Bloody Sunday, the 22nd of January 1905, provided a spark, but the centres of revolutionary action were too far apart for coordination. Membership in both the Bolshevik and Menshevik ranks fell sharply from 1907 to 1908. The number of workers on strike in 1907 was already just 26% of the 1905 figure, dropping to 6% in 1908 and to 2% by 1910.

    From Swiss exile, Lenin drew lessons from these failures. He developed Marx's philosophy and began arguing, in his 1917 essay Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, that capitalist economic expansion inevitably produced colonial imperialism, which was then managed through nationalist wars among European empires. Imperial Germany, eager to knock Russia out of the Great War, sent Lenin and his Bolshevik cohort back into Russia in a diplomatically sealed train, expecting them to destabilise the Tsarist government. They did more than that.

  • As Lenin neared death after suffering strokes, his Testament of December 1922 named both Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin as the most capable men in the Central Committee, then criticised both of them sharply. Lenin specifically recommended that Stalin be removed from the post of General Secretary and replaced with someone "more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, and more attentive to comrades." Upon Lenin's death on the 21st of January 1924, the Central Committee read the testament aloud and then chose to ignore it.

    Stalin's 1926 text Concerning Questions of Leninism formally presented Marxism-Leninism as a distinct ideology, separate from other communist currents. It envisioned a global hierarchy of communist parties, each acting as a revolutionary vanguard in its own country. In 1934, a Pravda article by Karl Radek proposed calling the ideology Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, but Stalin himself preferred the shorter formulation, which both concealed his authorship and gave the doctrine a more universal claim.

    The 1938 official textbook History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) brought Marxism-Leninism to mass audiences. Stalin's earlier text Dialectical and Historical Materialism became the philosophical cornerstone, cited by the Great Russian Encyclopedia as the foundation of the entire Marxist-Leninist philosophical tradition. Stalin's application of this ideology to Soviet conditions also produced the policy of socialism in one country, a deliberate rejection of the older Marxist assumption that world revolution was a prerequisite for building socialism at home.

  • In the 1937-1938 period, the NKVD arrested 1.5 million people, drawn from every stratum of Soviet society. Of those, 681,692 were killed as enemies of the state. The Great Purge of 1936-1938 cleared the party of Old Bolsheviks, senior military officers, and anyone Stalin judged a potential rival. By 1939, none of the original Bolsheviks from the October Revolution of 1917 remained in the party, with the single exception of Stalin himself.

    The internal logic of this violence was administrative as much as ideological. Stalin governed by controlling policy formulation while delegating implementation to local functionaries. Those functionaries, exercising broad discretion, often used their authority corruptly or brutally. Stalin then assigned the NKVD to correct those abuses - which created a cycle in which arbitrary local terror was policed by centralised terror. The NKVD also ran the Gulag system of forced-labour camps, which housed political dissidents, artists deemed culturally insubordinate, intellectuals judged politically incorrect, religious anti-communists, and homosexual people.

    The 1936 Soviet Constitution altered the political structure by ending weighted voting preferences for workers, introducing universal suffrage for every man and woman over the age of 18, and organising the soviets into two legislative chambers: the Soviet of the Union, representing electoral districts, and the Soviet of Nationalities, representing the country's ethnic groups. The constitution was later cited by Stalin's supporters as evidence that the transition from capitalism to socialism was underway.

  • In 1948, Josip Broz Tito's refusal to subordinate Yugoslavia to Soviet geopolitical demands produced the Yugoslav-Soviet split. Stalin's response was to denounce Tito as an ideological revisionist, condemn Yugoslavia's practice of Titoism as a deviation from world communism, and expel the Communist Party of Yugoslavia from the Cominform. The split allowed Yugoslavia to develop what became known as socialism with Yugoslav characteristics, including commercial dealings with the capitalist West and, eventually, membership in the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961.

    The more consequential fracture came after Stalin's death. At a secret session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, on the 25th of February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev delivered his speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, naming and condemning Stalin's dictatorial excesses including the Great Purge. De-Stalinisation dismantled the Gulag archipelago, freed its prisoners, and granted public intellectuals greater freedom of expression, among them the novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

    For China, de-Stalinisation was a political crisis. Mao Zedong's adaptation of Marxism-Leninism to Chinese conditions had been built substantially on Stalinist foundations. The resulting Sino-Soviet split of 1956-1966 severed diplomatic, political, cultural, and economic relations between the two largest communist powers. China's Great Leap Forward, the ambitious industrialisation and collectivisation drive launched in the late 1950s, resulted in an estimated 15 to 55 million deaths between 1959 and 1961, most from starvation. Then, following the Sino-Soviet split, a further division emerged along the Sino-Albanian axis in the 1970s, when Albania's Enver Hoxha rejected Mao's 1972 meeting with President Richard Nixon as an ideological betrayal of the Three Worlds Theory.

  • The Cuban Revolution of 1953-1959, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, deposed the military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and established the Republic of Cuba, which the Soviet Union formally recognised. The CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion on the 17th of April 1961, carried out by anti-communist Cuban exiles, failed and pushed Cuba decisively toward the Soviet Union. The Cuban Missile Crisis ran from the 22nd to the 28th of October 1962; its resolution involved the United States removing missiles from Turkey and Italy in exchange for the Soviet removal of missiles from Cuba.

    In Southeast Asia, the Tet Offensive launched by North Vietnam on the 30th of January 1968 was a military setback for the guerrilla forces but a decisive psychological blow against United States support for the war. American troops withdrew from Vietnam in 1973. Saigon fell on the 30th of April 1975, and Vietnam was reunified under Marxist-Leninist government in 1976. Neighbouring Cambodia saw the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, establish Democratic Kampuchea in 1975, which carried out mass killings at the Killing Fields with deaths totalling 2,700,000 people. Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978, capturing Phnom Penh in January 1979 and deposing the Khmer Rouge.

    In Africa, Angola, Benin, Congo, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Somalia became communist states during the 1968-1980 period. Thomas Sankara established a peasant-based Marxist-Leninist government in Upper Volta in 1983, renamed the country Burkina Faso (meaning the land of upright people), refused foreign aid, and rejected the country's foreign debts. His former second-in-command Blaise Compaoré ordered his murder in 1987, ending what the source calls the Burkinabe social experiment.

  • Historians studying Marxist-Leninist states have long disagreed about what those states actually were. Silvio Pons and Robert Service argued that repression and totalitarianism arose directly from Marxist-Leninist ideology. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick criticised that conclusion, arguing it focused too narrowly on the upper levels of society and that concepts like totalitarianism had obscured the actual workings of the system.

    The historiography of communist states is itself described as polarised between traditionalists and revisionists. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr identified the split, noting that revisionists are more numerous and dominate academic institutions and learned journals. Matt Lenoe described the revisionist position as insisting that the old totalitarian image of the Soviet Union was oversimplified, and that the Communist Party leadership had had to adjust to real social forces.

    The socio-economic character of Stalin-era Soviet society (1924-1953) remains contested. Academics have variously labelled it bureaucratic collectivism, state capitalism, state socialism, or a wholly unique mode of production. China's current structure has been referred to as nationalistic state capitalism. According to Rachel Walker, the term Marxism-Leninism is itself dynamic - both fixed and open to redefinition - because Marx and Lenin never sanctioned the creation of an -ism in their names. North Korea removed all constitutional references to Marxism-Leninism in 1992 and 2009, replacing them with Juche, which Michael Seth has described as a version of Korean ultranationalism. Meanwhile, ongoing Marxist-Leninist and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist insurgencies continue in the Philippines, India, and Turkey, and the Nepalese civil war fought by Marxist-Leninist-Maoists ended in their victory in 2006.

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MarxismLeninism

Common questions

Who created Marxism-Leninism and when did it develop?

Marxism-Leninism was created by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union during the 1920s, based on his synthesis of classical Marxism and Leninism. His 1926 text Concerning Questions of Leninism formally presented it as a distinct ideology, and the 1938 textbook History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) popularised it widely.

Which countries still use Marxism-Leninism as their official ideology today?

China, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam currently hold Marxism-Leninism as the official ideology of their ruling parties, though each gives it different interpretations in practice. North Korea's state ideology, Juche, derives from Marxism-Leninism but constitutional references to it were removed in 1992 and 2009.

What was the Sino-Soviet split and how did it affect Marxism-Leninism?

The Sino-Soviet split of 1956-1966 severed diplomatic, political, cultural, and economic relations between the Soviet Union and China, arising from ideological and nationalist tensions after Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation. It produced competing claims to leadership of world communism, contributed to Maoism developing as a distinct tradition, and later caused the Sino-Albanian split in the 1970s when Albania's Enver Hoxha rejected Mao's 1972 meeting with President Nixon.

What did Khrushchev's secret speech say about Stalin and Marxism-Leninism?

On the 25th of February 1956, at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev delivered On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, condemning Stalin's dictatorial excesses including the Great Purge of 1936-1938. Khrushchev presented de-Stalinisation as a restoration of Leninism and dismantled the Gulag system of forced-labour camps as part of this process.

How did historians debate the nature of Marxist-Leninist states?

Historians split between traditionalists, who stressed the totalitarian nature of communist states and Stalin's near-absolute power, and revisionists, who emerged from the 1960s and argued that the Soviet leadership had to adjust to real social forces and that the totalitarian model was oversimplified. Scholars have also debated whether the Stalin-era Soviet Union (1924-1953) represented state capitalism, bureaucratic collectivism, state socialism, or a unique mode of production.

What role did Marxism-Leninism play in Cold War conflicts in Asia and Latin America?

Marxist-Leninist movements shaped major Cold War conflicts across both regions. In Asia, the Viet Minh defeated French colonial forces and North Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive on the 30th of January 1968, eventually leading to the fall of Saigon on the 30th of April 1975. In Latin America, the Cuban Revolution of 1953-1959 established a Soviet-allied state, and Nicaragua saw the Sandinista National Liberation Front win power in 1979 before facing a Reagan-sponsored Contra War that concluded with the Tela Accord in 1989.

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