About the book: 2017 / Until now, more than 60 years after Khrushchev’s “closed report” at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, it remains unclear what What is “Stalinism”, since there was no Marxist study of this phenomenon before the appearance of this book. Many even reject this very concept, considering it only a meaningless label intended to discredit socialism. This also happens, but it is not so simple. This book is a critical, scientific, source-based, and unparalleled study of the phenomenon of Stalinism, which, among other things, examines the alternatives proposed at the time. The author's analysis is not crudely simplified anti-Stalinism, which often, in his opinion, leads to anti-communist renegadeism. The author, a famous Marxist philosopher from the GDR, born in 1928, studied philosophy and history at universities in Halle and Berlin after the Second World War. In the 1960s, he was director of the Philosophical Institute of the Karl Marx University in Leipzig and dean of the Faculty of Philosophy. In 1975 he received the national prize of the GDR. From 1973 - member of the International Institute of Philosophy in Paris, from 1983 to 1988 - vice-president of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies.