ABSTRACT
Western scholarship has been tardy in fixing analytic attention upon Stalinism. The forcible mass collectivization, the industrialization drive, and other events of the Stalinist revolution from above of the 1930's were officially described as Marxism-Leninism in action–the natural and logical unfolding of the original Leninist revolutionary impulse and program. This chapter argues that Stalinism, despite conservative, reactionary, or counter-revolutionary elements in its makeup, was a revolutionary phenomenon in essence. It also argues that the Stalinist revolution from above, whatever the contingencies involved in its inception and pattern, was an integral phase of the Russian revolutionary process as a whole. The culturalist factors in the Stalinist revolution from above implies that Stalin's personality alone must not be seen as the explanation of why Soviet development proceeded in the revolutionary manner that it did under his leadership in the 1930's. The distinction between a palace revolution or coup d'etat and a full-scale sociopolitical revolution is familiar and generally accepted.
