the significant ideas of the period, including autocracy, Marxism, communism, Leninism, Stalinism, and collectivisation

Question 1

Autocracy

Answer 1

a system of government by one person with absolute power.
The backing by the church and the noblesmade the tsar the autocrat of all Russians.

‘In an autocracy, all political power rests in the hands of one person’
~ Nelson, Russia and the Soviet Union, 2015 pg21

Question 2

Marxism

Answer 2

Marxismis a social, political, and economic philosophy named after KarlMarx. It examines the effect of capitalism on labor, productivity, and economic development and argues for a worker revolution to overturn capitalism in favour of communism.

’Behind the October Revolution there are more influential personalities than the thinkers and executors of Marxism.’’ ~ Lenin

Question 3

Communism

Answer 3

a theory or system of social organisation in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs.

Question 4

Leninism

Answer 4

Leninism is a political ideology developed by Russian Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin that proposes the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat led by a revolutionary vanguard party, as the political prelude to the establishment of communism.

Question 5

Stalinism

Answer 5

As a variant ofMarxism-Leninism,Stalinismhad three key features;

Reliance ondialectical materialismas a way of justifying almost any course of action thatStalinwished to pursue.

Cult of personality. Whereas Lenin had claimed that the workers suffered fromfalse consciousnessand therefore needed a vanguard party to guide them, Stalin maintained that the Communist Party itself suffered from falseconsciousnessand therefore needed an all-wise leader—Stalin himself—to guide it.

“Socialism in one country”—i.e., building up the industrial base and military might of the Soviet Union before exporting revolution abroad. (NEP, Collectivisation, Heavy Industrialisation, Five Year Plans.)

Question 6

Collectivisation

Answer 6

Collectivisation, policy adopted by the Soviet government, pursued most intensively between 1929 and 1933, to transform traditional agriculture in the Soviet Union and to reduce the economic power of the kulaks (prosperous peasants).