Stalin’s Dilemma: The Structural Contradiction of Socialist Underdevelopment (2025)

This paper introduces the concept of “Stalin’s Dilemma” to explain the structural contradiction of socialist development in economically underdeveloped societies. The term designates the crisis that arises when a revolutionary state enters communism prematurely and must choose between acknowledging its unreadiness or substituting economic immaturity with political maturity. Using the Soviet Union as the archetype, the study argues that Stalinism was not merely the product of personal despotism but a historical response to material scarcity, an attempt to replace the absent mechanisms of capitalism with political coordination and coercive acceleration.