Vanguardism, a core concept of Leninism, is the idea that a revolutionary vanguard party, composed of the most conscious and disciplined workers, must lead the proletariat in overthrowing capitalism and establishing socialism, ultimately progressing to communism.
The vanguard works to engage the working class in revolutionary politics and to strengthen proletarian political power against the bourgeoisie.
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.
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 leading role of the party is a constitutional principle of communist states. It holds that the ruling party leads the state by virtue of being the vanguard of the proletariat, a communist party.
Ba'athism, also spelled Baathism, is an Arab nationalist ideology which advocates the establishment of a unified Arab state through the rule of a Ba'athist vanguard party operating under a revolutionary socialist framework. The ideology is officially based on the theories of the Syrian intellectuals Michel Aflaq (per the Iraqi-led Ba'ath Party), Zaki al-Arsuzi (per the Syrian-led Ba'ath Party), and Salah al-Din al-Bitar. Ba'athist leaders of the modern era include the former president of Iraq Saddam Hussein, and former presidents of Syria Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar al-Assad.
The Ba'athist ideology advocates the "enlightenment of the Arabs" as well as the renaissance of their culture, values and society. It also advocates the creation of one-party states and rejects political pluralism in an unspecified length of time—the Ba'ath party theoretically uses an unspecified amount of time to develop an "enlightened" Arab society. Ba'athism is founded on the principles of Arab nationalism, pan-Arabism, and Arab socialism, as exemplified by its slogan "Unity, Freedom, Socialism".
Leninism (Russian: Ленинизм, Leninizm) is a political ideology developed by Russian Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin that proposes the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat led by a revolutionary vanguard party as the political prelude to the establishment of communism. Lenin's ideological contributions to the Marxist ideology relate to his theories on the party, imperialism, the state, and revolution. The function of the Leninist vanguard party is to provide the working classes with the political consciousness (education and organisation) and revolutionary leadership necessary to depose capitalism in the Russian Empire (1721–1917).
Leninist revolutionary leadership is based upon The Communist Manifesto (1848), identifying the communist party as "the most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties of every country; that section which pushes forward all others." As the vanguard party, the Bolsheviks viewed history through the theoretical framework of dialectical materialism, which sanctioned political commitment to the successful overthrow of capitalism, and then to instituting socialism; and, as the revolutionary national government, to realise the socio-economic transition by all means.
The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), also known as the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (RSDWP) or the Russian Social Democratic Party (RSDP), was a socialist political party founded in 1898 in Minsk, Russian Empire. The party emerged from the merger of various Marxist groups operating under Tsarist repression, and was dedicated to the overthrow of the autocracy and the establishment of a socialist state based on the revolutionary leadership of the Russian proletariat.
The RSDLP's formative years were marked by ideological and strategic disputes culminating at its Second Congress in 1903, where the party split into two main factions: the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, who advocated a tightly organized vanguard of professional revolutionaries; and the Mensheviks, led by Julius Martov and others, who favored a more moderate, broad-based model. During and in the years after the 1905 Revolution, the RSDLP operated both legally and underground, publishing newspapers, infiltrating trade unions, and agitating among industrial workers.
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.