This book is about what happened in Soviet Russia (and, from 1924, the USSR) after the October Revolution of 1917 and before the Stalinist Revolution of the late 1920s and early 1930s. It has been conceived as a work of historical synthesis in two senses. First, it seeks to combine social and political history, reflecting my own general belief that political institutions are shaped by the social environment from which they spring and that political behavior in turn effects changes in the social environment, although often in unforeseen ways. The time when Soviet history could be written in terms of pure political voluntarism, of untrammeled state power acting upon a hapless society, thankfully has passed. By the same token, “bringing the state back in” has hardly been necessary, for it has rarely if ever been left out of accounts of this or any other period of Soviet history.

Secondly, while it draws on my own research, primarily into industrial relations, the book relies most heavily on the work of other scholars, both western and Soviet. Such dependence has its potential pitfalls. Extracting the core of others' arguments inevitably means sacrificing the subtleties and nuances, not to mention much of the substantiating data, on which arguments are based.