ABSTRACT
As we saw in a previous chapter, People’s Commissar of State Control Joseph Stalin was an outspoken defender of the need for a powerful state bureaucracy. 1 Stalin never wavered in his commitment to the strong state. His claim that as socialism was approached, the state grew stronger all the time is well known. From the leader’s own perspective, the proletarian state should be strengthened as an instrument of class war. There was involved a paradoxical outflow of the Marxist thesis that the destruction of the hostile classes – national and international – was the main precondition for the disappearance of the state. Destroying the enemy classes could only be accomplished by a state operating at maximum strength. At the January 1933 Central Committee plenum, the dictator said authoritatively:
The dying of the state takes place not through the weakening of state power, but through its maximum strengthening, necessary in order to kill off the rudiments of the dying classes and to organise the defence against the capitalist encirclement. 2
