it is "contradictory." But this contradiction springs from life itself and reflects completely Marxist dialectic. The idea that the state would wither away was later abandoned by Stalin at the 18th Congress (held in 1939), in which he expressed confidence that the state would exist, even if the Soviet Union reached communism, as long as it was encircled by capitalism. Two key concepts were created in the latter half of his rule; the "two camp" theory and that of "capitalist encirclement". The threat of capitalism was used to strengthen Stalin's personal powers, and Soviet propaganda began making a direct link with Stalin and stability in society, claiming that the country would crumble without the leader. Stalin deviated greatly from classical Marxism when it came to "subjective factors", claiming that party members, whatever rank, had to profess fanatic adherence to the party's line and ideology, and that otherwise those policies would fail. De-Stalinization After Stalin died and once the ensuing power struggle subsided, a period of de-Stalinization developed, as Soviets debated what Marxism–Leninism would be in the absence of its de facto enforced equivalence with Stalinism. During the Khrushchev Thaw, the answer that emerged was that it would continue to involve central planning to the nearly complete exclusion of market mechanisms, as well as the totalitarian version of collectivism and continuing xenophobia, but that it would no longer involve the extreme degree of state terror seen during the Great Purge era. This ideological viewpoint maintained the secular apotheosis of Lenin, treating the terror aspect of Stalinism as a perversion that had been belatedly corrected, rather than admitting that Lenin himself had built a legacy of state terror. This storyline persisted into the Gorbachev era and even mostly survived glasnost. As Soviet military officer and Lenin biographer Dmitri Volkogonov described it, "Lenin was the last bastion to fall." Concepts Dictatorship of the proletariat Lenin, according to his interpretation of Marx's theory of the state, believed democracy to be unattainable anywhere in the world before the proletariat seized power. According to Marxist theory, the state is a vehicle for oppression and is headed by a ruling class, an "organ of class rule". He believed that by his time, the only viable solution was dictatorship since the war was heading into a final conflict between the "progressive forces of socialism and the degenerate forces of capitalism". The Russian Revolution of 1917 was already a