Foundations of Leninism (Russian: Об основах ленинизма, Ob osnovakh leninizma) was a 1924 collection made by Joseph Stalin that consisted of nine lectures he delivered at Sverdlov University that year.

Stalin opens his second lecture, on methods, with a reference to the period of the Second International in which Karl Kautsky and other orthodox Marxists adopted "opportunistic" (revisionist) principles to preserve unity in the social-democratic parties.

Bolshevik Leon Trotsky (who led the leftist opposition to Stalin) referred to the lectures in The Permanent Revolution as "ideological garbage", "an official manual of narrow-mindedness" and "an anthology of enumerated banalities",[5] characterizing them as part of a propaganda campaign by Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Kamenev.

[7][8] Erik van Ree, a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam's Institute of Eastern European Studies, notes that Foundations of Leninism contributed to Stalin's developing synthesis of Marxism with Russian nationalism in the form of social patriotism.

[9] In contrast to the Trotskyist movement, African American civil rights activist and Soviet politburo member Harry Haywood received the text extremely positively, particularly praising Stalin's theories on the nature of imperialism in relation to Jim Crow and slavery.