The Magic Lantern

With the growth of an organized workers’ movement in the mid-19th century influenced by the ideology of Karl Marx, communist and socialist parties increasingly competed for influence and political power in last decades of the Russian Empire. Russia’s October Revolution of 1917 saw the tsarist state fall to an explicitly socialist regime led by Lenin’s Bolshevik Party. Where Marx insisted that the revolution to overthrow socialism would be led by the workers, i.e., the proletariat, Lenin believed that a vanguard party could lead a state to revolution and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin’s successors, particularly Stalin, insisted that socialism could exist only in the Soviet Union, and a global revolution could come later.

Marxism-Leninism in practice consisted of one-party rule by a worker’s party, state control of the economy and mass media, and strict surveillance of the population to prevent the establishment of a coherent opposition, often through use of a secret police force. The commitment to social equality in communist regimes meant guaranteed housing, education, and employment, and some commitment to gender equality and maternity leave. These social commitments were meant to demonstrate not only progress toward a communist utopia, but also indicate superiority to capitalist regimes that lacked such guarantees.