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 and striking in it, was the assertion of the self-sufficiency of the Russian Revolution. All the rest was a repetition of traditional Bolshevik truisms…[It] represented a radical revision of the party’s attitude. But the revision was undertaken in a manner that seemed to deny the very fact of revision and to represent it as straight continuation of an orthodox line of thought. We shall not lead the reader farther into the thick of this dogmatic battle. Suffice it to say that Stalin did his best to graft it on to the body of doctrine he had inherited from Lenin.” It can be seen then, that in the area of ideology the main difference between Lenin and Stalin is that Stalin was far greatly inclined to subjecting purity of doctrine to political expediency. It is true Stalin operated in an atmosphere that was a lot more highly ch...
