Book: The Foundations of Leninism

Overview
The Foundations of Leninism (1924) distills Joseph Stalin’s lectures to Soviet party cadres shortly after Lenin’s death, offering a compact codification of “Leninism” as the Marxism of the epoch of imperialism and proletarian revolutions. Stalin frames Leninism not as a departure from Marx and Engels but as their development under new historical conditions, turning Lenin’s scattered writings and Bolshevik practice into a systematic doctrine that could guide the Communist Party and the Communist International.

Historical Roots and Method
Stalin grounds Leninism in the rise of imperialism as a world system marked by monopolies, finance capital, colonial partition, and intensified inter-imperial rivalry. This era’s uneven development creates weak links where revolution can break first. He emphasizes a method that unites theory with practice: Marxism must be applied concretely to living reality, not ossified into dogma. Strategy follows from correct analysis of class forces, the balance between city and countryside, and the international situation.

Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the State
Central is the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transitional state that suppresses the overthrown exploiters and reorganizes society on socialist lines. Stalin underscores that this state is a higher democracy for the working majority, organized through soviets, and necessarily coercive against counterrevolution. The proletariat must lead an alliance with the peasantry, differentiating among poor, middle, and rich peasants, and neutralizing or breaking the resistance of kulaks. The old bourgeois state machinery cannot be taken over; it must be smashed and replaced by organs of workers’ power, laying the groundwork for the eventual withering away of the state under communism.

The Party
The Communist Party is defined as the vanguard of the proletariat: a disciplined, centralized, combative organization bound by democratic centralism. Internal debate culminates in unity in action; iron discipline is inseparable from deep ties to the masses. The party selects and tests cadres in struggle, educates them in Marxist theory, and enforces a style of work that combines bold initiative with sober accounting, criticism and self-criticism, and constant verification of decisions in practice. Without such a party, Stalin argues, the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be sustained.

The National and Colonial Question
Building on Lenin, Stalin treats the national question as integral to the revolution. Nations have the right to self-determination, including secession, and communists must combat Great-Power chauvinism as well as local nationalism. In the colonial and semi-colonial world, national liberation movements are seen as reserves of the proletarian revolution; alliances are possible, provided the proletariat maintains ideological and political independence. The goal is voluntary union of peoples under socialism, not coerced assimilation.

Strategy and Tactics
Leninist strategy demands flexibility: combining legal and illegal work, parliamentary and extra-parliamentary struggle, and carefully calibrated united fronts with non-communist forces against the main enemy of the moment. Stalin polemicizes against both opportunism, which tails the bourgeoisie, and ultra-leftism, which isolates revolutionaries from the masses. In Russia, the bourgeois-democratic revolution became socialist under proletarian leadership because the bourgeoisie proved incapable of resolving the agrarian and national questions.

Internationalism and the Possibility of One-Country Advance
Stalin affirms proletarian internationalism and the role of the Communist International, yet argues, against Social-Democratic orthodoxy and Trotsky’s skepticism, that uneven development makes it possible for socialism to achieve victory first in one or several countries. Such a breakthrough must defend itself, build socialism at home, and aid revolutions abroad, functioning as a base for the global struggle against imperialism.

Role and Legacy
The text crystallized the official Soviet interpretation of Leninism in the mid-1920s, serving as a manual for party education. It fuses doctrine with lessons drawn from Bolshevik experience, seeking to equip communists with a coherent framework for seizing power, transforming society, and navigating a hostile international environment.