How did Stalinism/Communism shape Russia, even stil today?
Despite their different social beliefs, both Lenin and Stalin were successful in getting their personal aims carried out. This, of course, would have presented no problem for the dictator Stalin, but for Lenin to have achieved this is a more impressive feat. While things may have taken longer to achieve under Lenin, such as Russia’s withdrawal from the First World War, he was carefully steering the country according to his own ideology. This discreet authoritarian control could be argued to have been a forerunner of Stalin’s overt dictatorial regime. The idea of political control through terror is usually more associated with Stalin than Lenin however it was Lenin who laid the police state foundations which made Stalin’s monstrous feats technically possible. Leninism and Stalinism are unquestionably linked. Lenin’s ideas of political control and of war communism lead to Stalin’s style of power, just on an incomparable scale. When Gorbachev came to power in 1985 he had no intention of d
