shadow of the Red Army, and the assistance to Mao in China from early 1946 forward. But examined closely, these cases disappear as exceptions, for the direct Soviet interest had directed Moscow's interest in both cases.

While Stalin's communist opponents, both within and without the Soviet Union, could and did argue that his conception violated the aspirations of most Russian Communists and the bulk of the pre-revolutionary writings of Lenin, Stalin's theory was in full harmony with Lenin's practice, and he sought valiantly to make it consistent with selected extracts from Lenin's texts.

Whereas Stalin's views on socialism in one country were expressed firmly and promptly after Lenin's death, his theory of the Party and State underwent some progression over the years. The brute fact of bureaucratic dictatorship was difficult to square with the revolutionary hopes and myths; and, to this day, the method of dictatorship is concealed beneath the elaborate theological and even institutional cover.

To the extent that Stalinist theory has made explicit the emerging role of the Soviet state it has depended heavily on its prior rationale for "socialism in one country." Stalin's progression on this subject closely parallels events within the Soviet Union and his own policies. Like other aspects of Stalin's theories, his views on the state may be legitimately regarded as an ex-post rationale for policy decisions and actions already taken.

During the NEP, Stalin wrote as follows, in the course of an argument urging the Party to bide its time before instituting accelerated programs of collectivization and industrialization:

The concept of dictatorship of the proletariat is a state concept. The dictatorship of the proletariat necessarily includes the concept of force. There is no dictatorship without force, if dictatorship is to be understood in the strict sense of the term. Lenin defines the dictatorship of the proletariat as "state power based directly on force." (Lenin, Collected Works, Russian edition, Vol. XIX, p. 315.) Hence, to talk about dictatorship of the party in relation to the proletarian class, and to identify it with the dictatorship of the proletariat is tantamount to saying that in relation to its own class the Party must not only be a

guide, not only a leader and teacher, but also a sort of state power employing force against it. Therefore, whoever identifies "dictatorship of the Party" with the dictatorship of the proletariat tacitly proceeds from the assumption that the prestige of the Party can be built up on force, which is absurd and absolutely incompatible with Leninism. The prestige of the Party is sustained by the confidence of the working class. And the confidence of the working class is gained not by force-force only kills it--but by the Party's correct theory, by the Party's correct policy, by the Party's devotion to the working class, by its contact with the masses of the working class, by its readiness and ability to convince the masses of the correctness of its slogans.

By 1930, however, with the First Five-Year Plan and forced collectivization in full cry, Stalin was more nearly prepared to define dictatorship of the proletariat as "state power based directly on force" with somewhat less attention to the requirements of popular persuasion. His pronouncements during the First Five-Year Plan include a positive rationale for the state, and a bold claim that the day when the state could wither away safely was still at some distance. At the Sixteenth Party Congress (1930) he said:

We are for the withering away of the state, while at the same time we stand for strengthening the dictatorship of the proletariat which represents the most potent and mighty of all the state authorities that have existed down to this time. The highest development of state authority to the end of making ready the conditions for the withering away of state authority: there you have the Marxist formula!

With Stalin firmly in control of both Party and State, and with his own canonization as the sole legitimate inheritor of the mantle of Marx, Engels, and Lenin gathering momentum, he moved to a still more explicit rationale for the Soviet State in his report to the Congress of the Communist Party in 1939. Here he links his doctrine of socialism in one country to the rationale for an all-powerful soviet state, displaying an evident confidence in modifying traditional Communist doctrine which in many fields marked the later phase of his rule:

It is sometimes asked: "We have abolished the exploiting classes; there are no longer any hostile classes in the country; there is nobody to

suppress; hence there is no more need for the state; it must die away. -why then do we not help our Socialistic state to die away? Why do we not strive to put an end to it? Is it not time to throw out all this rubbish of a state?"

What could have given rise to this underestimation? It arose owing to the fact that certain of the general propositions in the Marxist doctrine of the state were incompletely worked out and inadequate. It received currency owing to our unpardonably heedless attitude to matters pertaining to the theory of the state, in spite of the fact that we have twenty years of practical experience in matters of state which provide rich material for theoretical generalizations, and in spite of the fact that, given the desire, we have every opportunity of successfully filling this gap in theory. .

. . . what if Socialism has been victorious only in one country, taken singly, and if, in view of this, it is quite impossible to abstract oneself from international conditions-what then? Engel's formulation [the withering away of the state] does not furnish an answer to this question. . . .

In order to overthrow capitalism it was not only necessary to remove the bourgeois from power, it was not only necessary to exappropriate the capitalists, but also to smash entirely the bourgeois state machine and its old army, its bureaucratic officialdom and its police force, and to substitute for it a new, proletarian form of state, a new socialist state, and that, as we know, is exactly what the Bolsheviks did. But it does not follow that the new proletarian state may not preserve certain functions of the old state, changed to suit the requirements of the proletarian state. Still less does it follow that the forms of our Socialist state must remain unchanged, that all the original functions of our state must be fully preserved in the future. As a matter of fact, the forms of our state are changing and will continue to change in line with the development of our country and with the changes in the international situation. . . . We are going ahead toward Communism. Will our state remain in the period of Communism also?

...

Yes, it will, unless the capitalist encirclement is liquidated, and unless the danger of foreign military attack has disappeared. Naturally, of course, the forms of our state will again change in conformity with the change in the situation at home and abroad.

No, it will not remain and will atrophy if the capitalist encirclement is liquidated and a Socialist encirclement takes its place.

Here is where Communist theology left the matter down to the time of Stalin's death.

Thus German Marxism evolved into Russian Communism. But what agencies and institutions were to be constructed to carry out this "theology" and its imperatives? How was the word to be made flesh? How were faith and doctrine to manifest themselves in national polity?

For answers to these questions we turn to descriptions of Soviet economic and political structures.