For five years, from 1917 to 1922, Leninism was the Russian application of Marxist economics and political philosophy, effected and realised by the Bolsheviks, the vanguard party who led the fight for the political independence of the working class. In the 1925–29 period, Joseph Stalin established Leninism as the official and only legitimate form of Marxism in Russia, by amalgamating the political philosophies as Marxism–Leninism, which then became the state ideology of the Soviet Union.