Stalin the Red Tsar. How far do you agree with this judgement?
Stalin, upon his rise to power in 1929, assured the Russian peoples that he was a dedicated follower of Leninism; often saying that “Lenin is always with us” indicating that he wished to show how similar to Lenin he was going to be in his leadership. Despite this claim, in actual fact there were a number of distinctly Tsarist elements to his leadership. A Tsar is a leader who rules without parliaments in an absolute autocracy, often being resistant to any reforms; maintaining the feudal, peasant-based illiterate society. Furthermore, they were often intrinsically bound with the Russian Orthodox Church as well as being distinctively imperialistic and chauvinistic. To a large degree, Stalin fitted this model, perhaps most notably due to his “top-down” approach to leadership, thus leading to the idea that he was a “Red Tsar”. He did not fit the model fully, though, especially when it came to being anti-reform, where in fact Stalin was all for reform (though not always for the better) and believed in modernising the USSR and, despite his anti-Western stance, was a Westerniser and not a Slavophile. He was also not imperialistic like the Tsarist leaders had been, and knew that people would react badly to Russian cultural imperialism. The belief that Stalin was a Red Tsar perhaps also came from his self-portrayal as a ‘God-like’ figure, and his employment of very traditional tactics of fear and propaganda in his unquestionable rule.
Unlike the governments of Lenin and Khrushchev, Stalin was very wary of how much his party members knew and as such employed a strict hierarchy in order to withhold information from the lower members. The Tsars relied heavily on the loyalty of élites to strengthen the government, in particular the Russian Orthodox Church, who helped keep firm control of the Russian people. It is