pressive rule was legitimized by the "imprimatur of Lenin's creation and succession." Marx's theory became Lenin's doctrine and Stalin's creative justification. Lenin's Bolshevik ("Majority") party was formed in 1903 with the objective of a stagiest societal evolution of Europe and Russia in the gradual progression from feudalism to capitalism, to socialism, and to eventual communism. In the October Revolution of 1917, Lenin succeeded in establishing the Soviet Government, and after the 1920 Bolshevik victory in the Civil War, he gained political isolation for his party. Lenin believed that until he obtained European support and the ensuing transition to a communist society was complete, laws were necessary "to suppress the resistance of classes hostile to the proletariat." This acting law became a "dictatorship of the proletariat; [Lenin] instructed his followers to 'use both corruption and the threat of general extermination'" to ensure the authority of the temporary dictatorship. Still under Lenin, Stalin proposed a policy later known as Stalinism, a theory that sanctioned an unlimited and no longer temporary Soviet dictatorship with the radical intent of employing Socialism in a single country. Stalin appealed to that "Great Russian chauvinism" and to the Bolsheviks and many citizens who retained a fervent Communist idealism. The Socialist cause was the authority that justified both Lenin and Stalin's ruthless regimes. "Marxism gave [the dictators] a monopoly upon the truth, and possession of the truth meant for Bolsheviks 'everything was permitted'. The Party would never forget that it had taken power as an enlightened minority acting on behalf of a majority ignorant of its best interests. It was ideology, not a mandate, that legitimized the party."
             Stalin's policy-enforcement and paranoid terrorism led to tremendous suffering and loss of life; the interests of the individual were entirely sacrificed to those of the st...