Is Zambia a stalinist country?

[Flying Purple People Eater]

I mean stalinist in the vein of the Derg, North Korea, etc. here, so please don't get uber-mad.

Now, onto the main question, is Zambia a stalinist country? I've been meeting tons of people from central Africa and lots of them talk about how they came up against 'stalinist censors' and 'stalinist political repression' in Zambia. Is there actually a political background behind this, or is it just a common term for state repression in this case.

[Stalinist Speaker]

Nope they aren't stalinist. DPRK isn't either fully stalinist anymore.

[tuwix]

I mean stalinist in the vein of the Derg, North Korea, etc. here, so please don't get uber-mad.

Now, onto the main question, is Zambia a stalinist country? I've been meeting tons of people from central Africa and lots of them talk about how they came up against 'stalinist censors' and 'stalinist political repression' in Zambia. Is there actually a political background behind this, or is it just a common term for state repression in this case.

Stalinist country must have some sort of social justice (free education, free healthcare system, etc.). I've never heard about anything like that in case of Zambia.

[Red Commissar]

As best I can tell Zambia was one of several countries in Africa that had a self-styled revolutionary government, and as such typically tried to maintain good relations with other similar states and typically aligning to the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union or trying to be "non-aligned (the latter being the case fo Zambia). This often meant that there was a bureaucratic state with the party acting as a vehicle for job opportunities and advancement.

Zambia, like a lot of other post-colonial countries, had to deal with the issues of an economic base (mining) that was still largely owned by European companies and to modernize the country. This provided their justification for a state-directed process, to use the mineral wealth of the country to support its efforts. It also directed itself into supporting black liberation movements in neighboring Rhodesia (which it had been spun off from, now Zimbabwe) and later the broader battle in Southern Africa against the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Its expropriation and nationalization of its mining sector led to the usual conflicts with European and American states, though it did not appear to have received the same vitrol that Zimbabwe did for doing similar acts.

It doesn't seem Zambia paid any lipservice to Marxist-Leninist thought though like some other pro-Soviet states did in Africa, so I don't think it's accurate to call it a "stalinist" state in the vein of Derg Ethiopia, the People's Republic of Benin, Angola, or the People's Republic of the Congo. It was probably more in line with other left-wing nationalist states using their intrepretation of socialism as an alternative to foreign capital, like Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana or Julius Nyerere in Kenya.

Unlike say, Zimbabwe, this one-party dominance didn't last past the Cold War and the original party was overtaken by reform minded parties who backed off revolutionary slogans and tried to attract foreign investment. I think the same issues are still there relating to parties trying to rule unilaterly rather than pluralisticly, using a majority win in an election as a "mandate" to do what they want and bully opposition parties, but one can't say "Zambia" is stalinist by those standards. What probably doesn't help is the party currently in control and the one preceding it are nominally left-wing parties, so it might give an image of a socialist corruption, when really it's just parties acting out of self interest.