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.