Socialism in One Country is a theory mostly associated with the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin whose government adopted it as official policy. However the theory was heavily based on the writings of Soviet revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin.
Socialism in One Country proposes that it is possible to build Socialism ("complete socialist society") even in a single country, and even a poor less-developed one or a third world country. This went against the view held by dogmatists, trotskyists and other opportunists that socialism was possible only in wealthy industrial countries and only if established simultaneously in several of them. The dogmatist view was a vulgarization of Marxism & didn’t correspond to the material realities of the world in the epoch of global imperialism.
Trotskyists and many other opportunist groupings vehemently deny that Lenin supported the theory of Socialism in One Country. Examining this issue is the main focus of the latter portion of this article.
InternationalismOften times opportunists make the claim that Socialism in One Country goes against Proletarian internationalism or abandons the aim of World Revolution.
Trotsky claimed in his book
The Permanent Revolution that Socialism in One Country:
…makes a breach between the national revolution and the international revolution.This couldn’t be further from the truth. Socialism in One Country is a tactic to achieve those internationalist ends and history has proven it to be successful in it, since the Soviet Union actually managed to help many other revolutionary governments take power and spread Socialism to many other countries in all parts of the world.
…the victory of socialism is possible in separate countries, thus envisaging the prospect of the formation of two parallel centres of attraction; the centre of world capitalism and the centre of world socialism.Post too long. Click here to view the full text.