What was National Stalinism?
As a political variety within Leninism, different from what is usually called national communism, national Stalinism systematically opposed any form of liberalisation, let alone democratisation. Reactionary and self-centered, it valued autarky and exclusiveness. The fundamental values of such a regime are political voluntarism, sectarianism, radicalism, cult of hierarchy and authority, scorn for parliamentary democracy, and constitutionalism. This article first analyses the origins and the model for national Stalinism, and then looks at four cases amongst Eastern European countries in the post-Stalin era: Romania, Albania, Bulgaria, and Poland. In contrast to Nikolai Lenin, for Joseph Stalin, the complete, irreversible victory of socialism in Russia was not contingent upon the success of proletarian revolutions in the West.