No Modern Social Revolution has been as thorough going as the Russian. In a matter of months during 1917-18 massive revolts by industrial workers, peasants, and soldiers undercut the landed and capitalist classes and sealed the dissolution of the state machineries of the tsarist regime. The organized revolutionaries who claimed leadership within the revolutionary crisis were, moreover, dedicated to socialist ideals of equality and proletarian democracy. Yet the Russian Revolution soon gave rise to a highly centralized and bureaucratic party-state, which eventually became committed to propelling rapid national industrialization by command and terror. To understand why and how these outcomes developed, we shall analyze the possibilities, imperatives, and impossibilities created for conflicting forces by the Russian revolutionary situation after March, 1917. As in the French Revolution, two basic processes arising out of the revolutionary situation intersected to shape the outcomes of the Revolution. These were popular (especially peasant) revolts and the struggles of urban-based political leaderships to build new state organizations. But the Russian revolutionary crisis deepened much more rapidly and chaotically than the French. And revolutionary state builders in Russia faced more demanding tasks-at first of sheer revolutionary defense, and then of state-propelled industrialization — under far more threatening domestic and international conditions. The result was a Russian New Regime broadly similar to the French in its political centralization and urban-bureaucratic basis, yet also qualitatively different from the French New Regime in its dynamic orientation toward national industrialization under Party-state control.

Let us analyze the course of the Russian Revolution, beginning with the implications of the revolutionary conjuncture of 1917.

The Effects Of The Social-Revolutionary Crisis Of 1917

In the historiography of the Russian Revolution a vast preponderance of effort has been devoted to arguing- with a tone of either praise or blame why the Bolsheviks were able to destroy (or overcome) the liberal “February” phase of the Revolution. From a comparative perspective, this debate seems misdirected. We saw that even in the French Revolution, liberal political arrangements did not prevail. True, such arrangements did survive for several years.