Marxism–Leninism

The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, were a radical faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) which split with the Mensheviks at the Second Party Congress in 1903. The Bolshevik party, formally established in 1912, seized power in Russia in the October Revolution of 1917 and was later renamed the Russian Communist Party, All-Union Communist Party, and ultimately the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Its ideology, based on Leninist and later Marxist–Leninist principles, became known as Bolshevism.

The origin of the RSDLP split was Lenin's support for a smaller party of professional revolutionaries, as opposed to the Menshevik desire for a broad party membership. The influence of the factions fluctuated in the years up to 1912, when the RSDLP formally split in two. The political philosophy of the Bolsheviks was based on the Leninist principles of vanguardism and democratic centralism. Lenin was also more willing to use illegal means such as robbery to fund the party's activities. By 1917, influenced by the experiences of World War I, he reached the conclusion that the chain of world capitalism could "break at its weakest link" in Russia before it assumed the level of the advanced countries, opposing theorists such as Georgi Plekhanov. Lenin had also come to view poorer peasants as potential allies of the relatively small Russian proletariat.

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), at some points known as the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and sometimes referred to as the Bolshevik Party and Soviet Communist Party, was the founding and ruling political party of the Soviet Union. The CPSU was the sole governing party of the Soviet Union until 1990 when the Congress of People's Deputies modified Article 6 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution, which had previously granted the CPSU a monopoly over the political system. The party's main ideology was Marxism–Leninism. The party was outlawed under Russian president Boris Yeltsin's decree on 6 November 1991, citing the 1991 Soviet coup attempt as a reason.

The party started in 1898 as part of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In 1903, that party split into a Menshevik (m) ("minority") and Bolshevik (b) ("majority") faction; the latter, led by Vladimir Lenin, is the direct ancestor of the CPSU and is the party that seized power in the October Revolution of 1917. Its activities were suspended on Soviet territory 74 years later, on 29 August 1991, soon after a failed coup d'état by conservative CPSU leaders against the reforming Soviet president and party general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.

Bolshevism (derived from Bolshevik) is a revolutionary socialist current of Soviet Leninist and later Marxist–Leninist political thought and political regime associated with the formation of a rigidly centralized, cohesive and disciplined party of social revolution, focused on overthrowing the existing capitalist state system, seizing power and establishing the "dictatorship of the proletariat".

Bolshevism originated at the beginning of the 20th century in Russia and was associated with the activities of the Bolshevik faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party led by Vladimir Lenin, Bolshevism's main theorist. Other theoreticians included Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky. While Bolshevism was based on Marxist philosophy, it also absorbed elements of the ideology and practice of the socialist revolutionaries of the second half of the 19th century (Sergey Nechaev, Pyotr Tkachev, Nikolay Chernyshevsky) and was influenced by Russian agrarian socialist movements like the Narodniks.

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (2 March 1931 – 30 August 2022) was a Soviet and Russian politician who was the last leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 until the country's dissolution in 1991. He served as General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1985, and additionally as head of state from 1988. Ideologically, he initially adhered to Marxism–Leninism, but moved towards social democracy by the early 1990s.

Born in Privolnoye, North Caucasus Krai, into a peasant family of Russian and Ukrainian heritage, Gorbachev grew up under the rule of Joseph Stalin. In his youth, Gorbachev operated combine harvesters on a collective farm, before joining the Communist Party, which then governed the Soviet Union as a one-party state. Studying at Moscow State University, he married fellow student Raisa Titarenko in 1953 and received his law degree in 1955. Moving to Stavropol, he worked for the Komsomol youth organization and, after Stalin's death, became a keen proponent of the de-Stalinization reforms of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

Stalinism is the means of governing and Marxist–Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1927 to 1953 by Joseph Stalin. It included the creation of a one-party totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory of socialism in one country (until 1939), collectivization of agriculture, intensification of class conflict, a cult of personality, and subordination of the interests of foreign communist parties to those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, deemed by Stalinism to be the leading vanguard party of communist revolution at the time. After Stalin's death and the Khrushchev Thaw, a period of de-Stalinization began in the 1950s and 1960s, which caused the influence of Stalin's ideology to begin to wane in the USSR.

Stalin's regime forcibly purged society of what it saw as threats to itself and its brand of communism (so-called "enemies of the people"), which included political dissidents, non-Soviet nationalists, the bourgeoisie, better-off peasants ("kulaks"), and those of the working class who demonstrated "counter-revolutionary" sympathies. This resulted in mass repression of such people and their families, including mass arrests, show trials, executions, and imprisonment in forced labour camps known as gulags. The most notorious examples were the Great Purge and the Dekulakization campaign. Stalinism was also marked by militant atheism, mass anti-religious persecution, and ethnic cleansing through forced deportations. However, there was a short era of reconciliation between the Orthodox Church and the state authorities in WW2. Some historians, such as Robert Service, have blamed Stalinist policies, particularly the collectivization policies, for causing famines such as the Holodomor. Other historians and scholars disagree on the role of Stalinism.

Before the perestroika reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev that promoted a more liberal form of socialism, the formal ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was Marxism–Leninism, a form of socialism consisting of a centralised command economy with a vanguardist one-party state that aimed to realize the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Soviet Union's ideological commitment to achieving communism included the national communist development of socialism in one country and peaceful coexistence with capitalist countries while engaging in anti-imperialism to defend the international proletariat, combat the predominant prevailing global system of capitalism and promote the goals of Bolshevism. The state ideology of the Soviet Union – and thus Marxism–Leninism – derived and developed from the theories, policies, and political praxis of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Joseph Stalin.

Mao Zedong (26 December 1893 – 9 September 1976) was a Chinese politician, communist revolutionary, and political theorist who founded the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 and led the country from its establishment until his death in 1976. Mao served as chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1943 until his death, and as the party's de facto leader from 1935. His theories, which he advocated as a Chinese adaptation of Marxism–Leninism, are known as Maoism.

Born to a peasant family in Shaoshan, Hunan, Mao studied in Changsha and was influenced by the 1911 Revolution and ideas of Chinese nationalism and anti-imperialism. He was introduced to Marxism while working as a librarian at Peking University, and later participated in the May Fourth Movement of 1919. In 1921, Mao became a founding member of the CCP. After the start of the Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang (KMT) and CCP, Mao led the failed Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan in 1927, and in 1931 founded the Jiangxi Soviet. He helped build the Chinese Red Army, and developed a strategy of guerilla warfare. In 1935, Mao became leader of the CCP during the Long March, a military retreat to the Yan'an Soviet in Shaanxi, where the party began rebuilding its forces. The CCP allied with the KMT in the Second United Front at the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, but the civil war resumed after Japan's surrender in 1945. In 1949, Mao's forces defeated the Nationalist government, which withdrew to Taiwan.

The Sino-Soviet split was the gradual worsening of relations between China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) during the Cold War. This was primarily caused by divergences that arose from their different interpretations and practical applications of Marxism–Leninism, as influenced by their respective geopolitics during the Cold War of 1947–1991. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Sino-Soviet debates about the interpretation of orthodox Marxism became specific disputes about the Soviet Union's policies of national de-Stalinization and international peaceful coexistence with the Western Bloc, which Chinese leader Mao Zedong decried as revisionism. Against that ideological background, China took a belligerent stance towards the Western world, and publicly rejected the Soviet Union's policy of peaceful coexistence between the Western Bloc and Eastern Bloc. In addition, Beijing resented the Soviet Union's growing ties with India due to factors such as the Sino-Indian border dispute, while Moscow feared that Mao was unconcerned about the drastic consequences of nuclear warfare.

In 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin and Stalinism in the speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" and began the de-Stalinization of the USSR. Mao and the Chinese leadership were appalled as the PRC and the USSR progressively diverged in their interpretations and applications of Leninist theory. By 1961, their intractable ideological differences provoked the PRC's formal denunciation of Soviet communism as the work of "revisionist traitors" in the USSR. The PRC also declared the Soviet Union social imperialist. For Eastern Bloc countries, the Sino-Soviet split was a question of who would lead the revolution for world communism, and to whom (China or the USSR) the vanguard parties of the world would turn for political advice, financial aid, and military assistance. In that vein, both countries competed for the leadership of world communism through the vanguard parties native to the countries in their spheres of influence. The conflict culminated after the Zhenbao Island Incident in 1969, when the Soviet Union reportedly considered the possibility of launching a large-scale nuclear strike against China, and the Chinese leadership, including Mao, was evacuated from Beijing, before both sides eventually returned to diplomatic negotiations.