to express their opinion, but that opinion could only be expressed if it was in accordance with the "general interests of Soviet society." In short, the number of rights granted to an individual was decided by the state, and could be taken away by the state as it saw fit. Soviet Marxism–Leninism justified nationalism, and the media portrayed every victory of the Soviet Union as a victory for the communist movement as a whole. In large parts, Soviet nationalism was based upon ethnic Russian nationalism. Marxism–Leninism stressed the importance of the worldwide conflict between capitalism and socialism, and the Soviet press talked about progressive and reactionary forces, while claiming that socialism was on the verge of victory; that the "correlations of forces" were in the Soviet Union's favour. The ideology professed state atheism, and party members were not allowed to be religious. The state professed a belief in the feasibility of communist mode of production, and all policies were justifiable if it contributed to the Soviet Union's reaching that stage. Leninism In Marxist philosophy, Leninism is the body of political theory for the democratic organisation of a revolutionary vanguard party, and the achievement of a dictatorship of the proletariat, as political prelude to the establishment of the socialist mode of production, developed by Lenin. Since Karl Marx barely, if ever wrote about how the socialist mode of production would look like or function, these tasks were left for later scholars like Lenin to solve. His main contribution to Marxist thought is the concept of the vanguard party of the working class. The vanguard party was conceived to be a highly-knit centralised organization which was led by intellectuals, rather than by the working class itself. The party was open only to a small number of the workers, the reason being that the workers in Russia still had not developed class consciousness and therefore needed to be educated to reach such a state. Lenin believed that the vanguard party could initiate policies in the name of the working class even if the working class did not support them, since the vanguard party would know what was best for the workers, since the party functionaries had attained consciousness. Lenin, in light of the Marx's theory of the state (which views the state as an oppressive organ of the ruling class), had no qualms of forcing change upon the country. He viewed the dictatorship