National communism is a term describing various forms in which Marxism–Leninism and socialism has been adopted and/or implemented by leaders in different countries using aspects of nationalism or national identity to form a policy independent from communist internationalism. National communism has been used to describe movements and governments that have sought to form a distinctly unique variant of communism based upon distinct national characteristics and circumstances, rather than following policies set by other socialist states, such as the Soviet Union.
In each independent state, empire, or dependency, the relationship between social class and nation had its own particularities. The Ukrainian communists Vasil Shakhrai, Alexander Shumsky, and Mazlakh, and then the Tatar Sultan Galiyev, considered the interests of the Bolshevik Russian state at odds with those of their countries. Communist parties that have attempted to pursue independent foreign and domestic policies that conflicted with the interests of the Soviet Union have been described as examples of national communism; this form of national communism differs from communist parties/movements that embrace nationalist rhetoric. Examples include Josip Broz Tito and his independent direction that led Yugoslavia away from the Soviet Union, Imre Nagy's anti-Soviet democratic socialism, Alexander Dubček's socialism with a human face, and János Kádár's Goulash Communism.
