ABSTRACT
The impact of ideology on Soviet life is not easy to describe, since ideology permeates all aspects of life but commands little devotion. Although it occupies a position comparable to that of religion in medieval Europe, it receives mostly lip service from no longer enthusiastic believers. Militant during the revolution and the civil war, the subject of vigorous debate in the 1920s, with the coming to power of Joseph Stalin, communist ideology increasingly slipped into rhetoric. It was in the name of ideology that Stalin purged the leading lights of the Bolshevik party, his potential rivals and competitors. At the roots of Soviet ideology is Marxist theory, adapted by Lenin to Russian circumstances and known in the Soviet Union under the name "Marxism-Leninism." The two bases of Marxist philosophy are dialectical and historical materialism. Materialism proclaims the primacy of matter over spirit in the universe.
