t police to deal with political opposition. The difference is in the scale of the terror used. Stalinist terror was on a much larger scale than that of Leninist times, involving the execution and exile of millions of Soviet citizens. The social fabric was broken up, no-one knew who was an informer and parents were denounced by their children. Lenin tried to collectivize agriculture under the policy of War Communism, this failed, he reverted and followed the policy of NEP. Stalin ruthlessly collectivized agriculture and 'liquidated' an entire class the Kulaks. The Stalinist system was a regime of terror in the most vivid sense everyone was scared of the knock at the door in the middle of the night when the NKVD came.Stalin was a paranoid man who suspected that virtually everybody was an opponent, especially those whom he defeated to become leader. These men were executed, even Trotsky who left the Soviet Union in the late 1920s was tracked down to his home in Mexico and assassinated in 1940. Stalin's psychological make-up meant that his paranoia found its outlet in the execution of millions as enemies of the regime. There is no way that this could have had its basis in Leninism.The final point about wether Leninism lead to Stalinism was that Lenin, through his testament, made it very clear that he did not see Stalin as fit to lead the Soviet Union. This is of vital importance because it can therefore be argued that because Lenin did not want Stalin to get power the outcome of Leninism should have been anything but Stalinism. The fact that Stalinism did come into being shows that Stalinism was different to Leninism because Stalin was feared by Lenin.Therefore Stalinism shared some of the same attributes of Leninism. However because of the extreme nature of the terror, Stalin's personal psychological make-up and the fact that Lenin did not want Stalin to succeed him, Stalinism was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the inevitable outc...
