Leviathanism and The Soviet Demise

Chamseddine Mnasri has coined the new concept Leviathanism to trace the origins of Soviet statism to respectively the 1917 October Revolution, the Russian Civil War, the death of Lenin in 1924, the Great Purges of the 1930s and the subjugation of Soviet society via Stalin's personality cult culture. This book reads as a critique of leviathanism as a political ideology that, unlike socialism, created a police state rather than a workers' state. It argues that against the backdrop of Lenin's critique of the state, Stalin, due partly to Lenin's unintended party dictatorship, could bring together the dictates of rigid Bolshevik ideology and his own dictatorial ambitions in order to control society. Leviathanism, Mnasri argues, was the political ideology that led eventually to the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1991.