Like Marx, Lenin saw the proletarian revolution as a global phenomenon, but he modified some basic tenets of the Marxist theory. Lenin noticed the passivity of the workers in the advanced industrial countries and explained it as a consequence of the ability of the bourgeoisie to co-opt the working class within the system. According to Lenin, the bourgeoisie succeeded in ideologically corrupting the proletarians and their parties. It was therefore important to create a new type of political party that would refuse any form of collusion with the existing dominant forces and would eventually exert exclusive political power. For Lenin, a tightly knit, phalanxlike revolutionary organization, structured almost like a military order, was needed to inject revolutionary consciousness into the proletariat and direct the workers in the revolutionary battles. The party was the embodiment of historical reason and militants were expected to carry out its orders without hesitation or reservation. Discipline, secrecy, and rigid hierarchy were essential for such a party, especially during clandestine activities (like those in Russia). The main role of the party was to awaken proletarian self-consciousness and instill the revolutionary doctrine (faith) into the dormant proletariat. Instead of relying on the spontaneous development of consciousness in the working class, Leninism saw the party as a catalytic agent bringing revolutionary knowledge, will, and organization to the exploited masses. It was with Lenin that the mystique of a new type of party became an indelible feature of radical politics in the twentieth century.
The Fascists absorbed the Bolshevik lesson, internalizing Lenin's cult of the party, but they never developed a mystical partolatry. The main distinction, therefore, was that neither the Fascist Party in Italy nor the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) became charismatic institutions like the Bolshevik Party. They were the sounding boards for the leaders' harangues, collective entities meant to ensure the perpetuation of the Fürhrerprinzip. Alfredo Rocco was Mussolini's minister of justice and a close friend of Il Duce. His views emphasized organicism, romanticism, and statism as key components of the Fascist ideology: “To the existence of this ideal content of Fascism, to the truth of this Fascist logic we ascribe the fact that though we commit many errors of detail, we very seldom go astray on fundamentals, whereas all the parties of the opposition, deprived as they are of an informing, animating principle, of a unique directing concept, do very often wage their war faultlessly in minor tactics, better trained as they are in parliamentary and journalistic maneuvers, but they constantly broke down on the important issues.”12 Benito Mussolini, Italy's Fascist dictator between 1922 and his death in 1945, contributed in 1932 to the Enciclopedia Italiana with a famous entry on the doctrine of Fascism:
Thus Fascism could not be understood in many of its practical manifestations as a party organization, as a system of education, a discipline, if it were not always looked at in the light of its whole way of conceiving life, a spiritualized way…. The man of Fascism is an individual who is nation and fatherland, which is a moral law, biding together individuals and the generations into a tradition and a mission, suppressing the instant for a life enclosed within the brief round of pleasure in order to restore within duty the higher life free from the limits of time and space: a life in which the individual, through the denial of himself, through the sacrifice of his own private interests, through death itself, realizes that completely spiritual existence in which his value as a man lies. Fascism is a religious conception in which man is seen in his immanent relationship with a superior law and with an objective Will that transcends the particular individual and raises him to conscious membership in a spiritual society. Whoever has seen in the religious politics of the Fascist regime nothing than mere opportunism has not understood that Fascism besides being a system of government is also, above all, a system of thought.13
Ideological absolutism, sanctification of the ultimate goal, suspension of critical faculties, and the cult of the party line as the perfect expression of the general will were imbedded in the original Bolshevik project and definitely imbued Mussolini's political imagination.
I argue that the seeds of Stalin's regime were sowed by Lenin.14 He carried to an extreme Leninism's intolerant logic and turned the USSR into a police state. The Communist Party was transformed from a revolutionary elite into a bureaucratic caste whose sole aim was to preserve and enhance the leader's power and its privileges. Gradually, the dictatorship of the proletariat became an empty slogan legitimizing Stalin's absolute reign and secret police repression against the population. Invoking Lenin's struggle against factionalism, Stalin completely destroyed any intraparty democracy, viciously persecuted all (real or imaginary) opponents, and imposed a monolithic dictatorship based on permanent purges and mass terror. In the physical absence of the numinous leader incarnating the absolute power of the party, Lenin, the congregation of his disciples had to reinvent itself by means of founding its charisma on the scriptures of its founding fathers. The invented tradition of Marxism-Leninism was then thrust upon the party ranks as a means of stabilizing the normative identity of the party. The “return to Leninism” became an important theme of the anti-Stalin opposition, especially among Trotsky's supporters. Later, after Stalin's death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev proclaimed the restoration of the Leninist norms of party life and denounced Stalin's “cult of personality” (i.e., the quasi-religious adoration of the supreme leader) as non-Leninist. In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev deepened Khrushchev's critique of Stalinism and sought to instill pluralism within Soviet institutions. In his democratizing efforts, Gorbachev went beyond the logic of Leninism and abandoned both the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the party's claim to monopoly of power.
In 1919 Lenin created the Third (Communist) International—the Comintern, a global institution that the Fascists were never able to establish. Earlier he had lambasted the Second International for its loss of revolutionary fervor and complicity with bourgeois parliaments and governments. The Comintern consecrated Moscow's centrality and hegemonic role within world Communism. For a party to be accepted into the Comintern it had to unconditionally acquiesce to twenty-one conditions, including complete subordination to Soviet dictates. Lenin created the Comintern as an instrument for expanding the revolution and allowing Soviet Russia to escape “imperialist encirclement.” Later, Stalin transformed it into a mere instrument of Soviet foreign policy and by implication Russian imperialism. The Comintern was disbanded in 1943, but Communist parties continued to toe the Stalinist line. In the aftermath of World War II, Leninist parties came to power in East-Central Europe, China, North Korea, and North Vietnam (a Soviet-style regime existed in Mongolia since the 1920s). Later, in 1960, Fidel Castro publicly espoused Leninism and proclaimed the Communist nature of the Cuban Revolution. In all these cases, Communism represented the sum of political and ideological techniques (tactics) used by revolutionary parties to seize and consolidate monopolistic dictatorial regimes. Their only claim to legitimacy derived from the organized belief-structure shared by the elites and inculcated into the masses, according to which the party was the sole beneficiary of direct access to historical truth.