22.1: Marxism-Leninism

By the late 1960s, one-third of the world’s population lived in communist countries. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the People’s Republic of China loomed over a vast swath of Eurasia, while smaller countries like Vietnam and North Korea occasionally erupted in revolution. Communist revolutions also broke out in Latin America, succeeding only in Cuba. Non-aligned countries, such as India, were often as sympathetic to the “Soviet Bloc” (i.e. countries allied with or under the control of the USSR) as they were to the United States and the other major capitalist countries.

Behind the façade of strength and power, the USSR was one of the strangest historical paradoxes of all time. It was a country whose official political ideology, Marxism-Leninism, proclaimed an end to class warfare and the stated goal of achieving true communism, a worker’s state in which everyone enjoyed the fruits of science and industrialism and no one was left behind. In reality, the nation was in a perpetual state of economic stagnation, with its citizens enjoying dramatically lower standards of living, while toiling harder for fewer benefits than their contemporaries in the west. Marxism-Leninism was officially hostile to imperialism, and yet the USSR controlled the governments of most of its “allied” nations after World War II. Of all forms of government, communism was supposed to be the most genuinely democratic, responding to the will of the people instead of false representatives bought with the money of the rich. Yet, decision-making rested in the hands of high-level members of the communist party, the so-called apparatchiks, or arch-bureaucrats. Finally, Marxism-Leninism was officially a political program of peace, yet military power was a priority in the USSR.

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