thority. Furthermore A Short Course was not just purely an ideological work but a political justification as its final chapter dealt with “The Liquidation of the Remnants of the Bukharinite-Trostskyist Gang of Spies, Wreckers, and Traitors to the Country”. Here Stalin presented himself as defender of the Faith against the “heretics” - in reality his political enemies. The most serious deviations in A Short Course was regarding Lenin’s beliefs that after the revolution a classless society would come into being and that the state would wither away . Stalin stated that although a new social and economic order had been built, there still existed 3 classes: the working class, the peasantry and the working intelligentsia eg. administrators, teachers. These 3 classes however, were not in conflict and had “non-antagonistic” interests and drew common benefit from the state’s provision of employment, education, health care, nutrition and shelter. Also, no indication was given that this social structure would change in the near future. In respect to the withering 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 ...
