differences between both the ideologies, and the actual economic and political practice, of Lenin and Stalin’s beliefs.A significant historiographical issue to be aware of in the comparison of Lenin and Stalin is that between the two, Lenin was by far the greater political theorist and ideologue and yet had much less effective time, 6 years, to put his ideas into practice . Stalin on the other hand, was much more a man of action who produced comparatively far less written material, but who exercised his power for almost 30 years. Also Lenin had the unique opportunity to oversee the installation of a new order from scratch whereas Stalin came to power with the foundations of the new state already laid and therefore had the responsibility of continuing the work already begun. As such any comparison then, will be somewhat uneven as we will compare not only actions to actions, but in Stalin’s case, his actions to Lenin’s theory as well as to speculation, as to what Lenin may have done in practice, if he had lived longer.The main aspects of Lenin’s ideology were outlined in a number of written works, the most important of these were: “What Is To Be Done” (1902) and The State and Revolution (1917). In “What Is To Be Done?” Lenin presented the idea that although the Russian peasantry was a potential revolutionary force, it was not capable of developing a revolutionary consciousness of its own. Marx had regarded revolutionary class consciousness to be the natural and spontaneous product of the life experience of the working class . Lenin, by contrast, concluded that “class political consciousness can be brought only from the outside”. Without the assistance of the revolutionary intelligentsia, he argued, the working class could only develop a “trade-union consciousness” . Lenin’s solution was a revolutionary vanguard party that would come not from the peasantry or p...
