Bolshevism and Stalinism

Every great revolution puts forth, for debate by future scholars and partisans alike, a quintessential historical and interpretative question. Of all the historical questions raised by the Bolshevik revolution and its outcome, none is larger, more complex, or more important than that of the relationship between Bolshevism and Stalinism.

It is essentially the question of whether the original Bolshevik movement that predominated politically for a decade after 1917 and the subsequent events and social-political order that emerged under Stalin in the 1930s are to be interpreted in terms of fundamental continuity or discontinuity. It is also a question that necessarily impinges upon and shapes the historian’s perspective on a hos...