The term Stalinism came into prominence during the mid-1930s when Lazar Kaganovich, a Soviet politician and associate of Stalin, reportedly declared: "Let's replace Long Live Leninism with Long Live Stalinism!"

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; 18 December [O.S. 6 December] 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian-born revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–1952) and Chairman of the Council of …

Perestroika (/ ˌ p ɛr ə ˈ s t r ɔɪ k ə /; Russian: перестройка) was a political movement for reform within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) during the late 1980s widely associated with CPSU general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and his glasnost (meaning "openness") policy reform. The literal meaning of perestroika is "reconstruction", referring to the ...

The Khrushchev Thaw (Russian: хрущёвская о́ттепель, tr. khrushchovskaya ottepel, IPA: [xrʊˈɕːɵfskəjə ˈotʲ:ɪpʲɪlʲ] or simply ottepel) is the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s when repression and censorship in the Soviet Union were relaxed due to Nikita Khrushchev's policies of de-Stalinization and peaceful coexistence with other nations.

Stalinismus als Bezeichnung für die Herrschaft Josef Stalins. Durch Trotzkis Kritik an den politischen Verhältnissen in der Sowjetunion und durch Veröffentlichungen dissidenter Kommunisten, so beispielsweise Arthur Koestler, wurde der Begriff Stalinismus im westlichen Ausland, in der Sozialwissenschaft und in der Alltagssprache zum Synonym für den …

Stalinism had an ideology that existed independently of Stalin, but for Nazism, "Hitler was ideological orthodoxy", and Nazi ideals were by definition whatever Hitler said they were. In Stalinism, the bureaucratic apparatus was the foundation of the system, while in Nazism, the person of the leader was the foundation.

In North Korea, factions of the Workers Party of Korea attempt to remove Chairman Kim Il-sung by criticizing him for not "correcting" his leadership methods, developing a personality cult, distorting the "Leninist principle of collective leadership" and "distortions of socialist legality" (i.e. using arbitrary arrest and executions) and use ...

The anti-Stalinist left is an umbrella term for various kinds of left-wing political movements that opposed Joseph Stalin, Stalinism and the actual system of governance Stalin implemented as leader of the Soviet Union between 1927 and 1953. This term also refers to the high ranking political figures and governmental programs that opposed Joseph Stalin and his form of …

In Marxist philosophy, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a condition in which the proletariat holds state power. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the intermediate stage between a capitalist economy and a communist economy, whereby the post-revolutionary state seizes the means of production, compels the implementation of direct elections on behalf of and within the …

Some historians estimate that 14 million people were imprisoned in the Gulag labor camps from 1929 to 1953 (the estimates for the period from 1918 to 1929 are more difficult to calculate). Other calculations, by historian Orlando Figes, refer to 25 million prisoners of the Gulag in 1928–1953. A further 6–7 million were deported and exiled to remote areas of the USSR, and 4–5 million ...