acquired god-like status as the new state’s liberator, leader and saviour, his heir had to be seen to pay him the due respects. Stalin went to great lengths to be seen as a strict follower of Lenin’s ideological principles. Thus, delivering Lenin’s funeral oration he said:“We Communists are people of a special mould. We are made of special stuff. We are those who form the army of the Great Proletarian Strategist, the army of Comrade Lenin. There is nothing higher than belonging to this army…In leaving us Comrade Lenin abjured us to hold high and keep pure the great title of member of the party. We vow to thee Comrade Lenin, that we shall honourably fulfill this thy commandment.” On numerous points Stalin fully concurred with Lenin. Service remarks that as a young Bolshevik, it was reported that Stalin reacted with great enthusiasm to themes of dictatorship, terror, modernity, progress and leadership in Lenin’s writings. Once in power he stressed that the party was the institutional cornerstone of the October Revolution. This had been Lenin’s attitude in practice but not in his theoretical works. In 1924 Stalin gave a series of lectures on The Foundations of Leninism that gave expression to this. Probably Stalin’s most notable ideological contribution was The History of the All-Union Communist Party: A Short Course that was published in 1935. In A Short Course , Stalin presented his variety of socialism as a direct, scientific development of thought begun by Marx and Engels and continued by Lenin and through to himself. He presented his socialism not only as being pure, but as also the only acceptable variant of socialism. In this work, Stalin can be seen as the ultimate ideological pragmatist. Unlike Lenin, who once he had crystallized his ideology remained a “true believer”, Stalin’s ideology also served an ulterior purpose of reinforcing his legitimacy and au...
