g away of the state, Stalin put forward his official line at the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939: “Will our state be retained also in the period of Communism? Yes, it will be retained unless capitalist encirclement is liquidated and unless the danger of a military attack from abroad is liquidated also.” Given his obsession with power and the unlikelihood of either of these two preconditions becoming reality at anytime near to when he was speaking, it can be confidently said that Stalin had no intention of ever ushering in a stateless society in his lifetime. One of the most major points of doctrine where Stalin openly differed from Lenin was regarding the issue of Worldwide Socialist Revolution. As we have seen, Lenin believed that the Russian Revolution would spark off socialist revolutions across Europe. This did not occur and in December of 1924, Stalin proposed his idea of “Socialism in One Country ”. This idea suggested that basically it was not necessary for the Bolsheviks to have International Revolution as a major policy priority and that the focus should be on peaceful coexistence with the West, whilst building a Socialist society at home. Once again, below this difference of ideology was a deep and confusing power play between Stalin and Trotsky . A number of sources speak of this as being the real reason for Stalin’s deviation. Stalin’s most renowned biographer Isaac Deutscher gives us some insight when he says:“His immediate purpose was to discredit Trotsky and to prove for the nth time that Trotsky was no Leninist. Searching in Trotsky’s past, the triumvirs came across the theory of permanent revolution. They started a polemic against it:; and it was in the course of that polemic that Stalin arrived at his formula [of socialism in one country]” and“Now the operative part of Stalin’s thesis of Socialism in One Country, the thing that was really new ...
