Stalin adopted Marxism while in the Seminary,
and remained committed to it (at least officially) all his life.
It was not uncommon for young men of the intellectual class, or
"intelligentsia," to adopt revolutionary ideologies in the repressive
climate of Tsarist Russia, and Marxism, named for the German thinker
Karl Marx, was the most influential of these ideologies. In brief,
Marx declared that human history was determined by class warfare.
In an industrial society, he claimed, the triumph of the middle
class, or bourgeoisie, was followed by the rise of a proletariat,
or laboring class. Wealth, in this world-view, was concentrated
in bourgeois hands at the expense of the ever-more-impoverished
working class--an intolerable situation that would inevitably lead
to revolution and the establishment of the "dictatorship of the
proletariat." This in turn would prelude a utopia in which all
class distinctions would be abolished, and with it poverty itself.
The appeal of Marxism lay in its claim to being scientific: it
claimed to have discovered the objective "laws" of history, in
which revolutions could be accurately predicted given certain conditions.
Unfortunately, this notion of Marx's "infallibility" would lead
to disastrous consequences, as it forced an all-or-nothing adherence;
Marxist regimes were driven to follow disastrous policies, for
to repudiate one point of the ideology was logically to repudiate
it all: Stalin's Five-Year Plan and collectivization horror figured
most prominently among these deadly disasters.