This chapter focuses on the two Russian revolutions in 1917 and US responses to them. The Wilson administration enthusiastically welcomed the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy in March, quickly recognized the new Provisional Government, and extended large loans in the hope that a democratic Russia would stay in the war against Germany. But after radical, antiwar socialists seized power in November, the United States refused to recognize the new Soviet regime, provided covert aid to anti-Bolshevik (“White”) armies, and sent small military expeditions to Archangel and Vladivostok. Contrary to earlier studies, the chapter shows that the United States sought to speed the demise of the Bolshevik regime. US forces fought directly against the Red Army in northern Russia and battled Red partisans in the Far East, while the American Relief Administration, American Red Cross, and Young Men’s Christian Association all aided White armies. Despite the interventions by the United States and its allies, the Bolsheviks prevailed. The legacies of these events included the US rejection of diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia until 1933 and Soviet conceptions of Russia as a “besieged fortress.”

How did peat become part of Russia’s industrial metabolism? This chapter traces the physical mobilization of peat in the late imperial period and during the early Soviet electrification campaign, highlighting the importance of regional perspectives for efforts to write an environmental history of Russia’s industrializing economy. From the late nineteenth century, peat played an increasingly important role as an industrial fuel, inspiring technical elites to consider it a source of electric power. This idea was subsequently incorporated into the GOĖLRO-plan for the Electrification of Russia, which firmly anchored peat in the power industry. The early Soviet energy system, with its emphasis on regionally available energy sources, was not solely a product of Bolshevik power. Instead, it must be situated within longer trajectories of regionalized fuel use and the experience of a war-related fuel crisis that predated the 1917 Revolution.

Building on the institutional genes of the Tsarist autocracy, the Russian Orthodox Church and the secret political societies analyzed in the previous chapter, this chapter explores the origins of the Bolshevik Party, which was the first communist totalitarian party. It analyzes the Bolsheviks’ transformation from a secretive organization to a ruling totalitarian party characterized by a personality cult and Red Terror. The chapter then outlines the institutional prerequisites for the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, noting the absence of constitutional backing for the Provisional Government and the appropriation of power under the guise of Soviet authority. Furthermore, the chapter details the consolidation of a comprehensive totalitarian system, including the suppression of opposition through dictatorship of the proletariat, the application of Red Terror tactics, the establishment of total state ownership, and the role of the Comintern in initiating communist totalitarian revolutions internationally, all of which were prerequisites for the creation of the Chinese communist totalitarian regime.

This chapter examines the role of oil in the early Soviet period, analysing the importance Lenin and Stalin attached to this commodity for domestic development and international trade.

The chapter traces attitudes of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Marxists toward paid domestic labor and domestic servants. Discursively connecting domestic service with slavery and serfdom, European and Russian radical thinkers saw it as antimodern. Following this line of thinking, the Bolsheviks emphasized the nonproductive nature of servants’ labor and placed them outside of “the modern proletariat.” Only after the active participation of domestic servants in the First Russian Revolution of 1905 did the party began to engage with what was then the largest female occupational group outside of agriculture. The chapter demonstrates that the Bolsheviks had given little thought to the place of paid domestic labor in the new society, anticipating its disappearance. Yet, it also shows that the key elements of the Bolsheviks’ approach to domestic service were present in their prerevolutionary thinking: ambiguity about the class status of servants, paternalistic attitudes toward them as the most backward members of the proletariat, and, most importantly, the vision of society in which housework was women’s work, whether it was paid or unpaid.

The outcome of the Great War shook to its foundations the idea of the Westphalian state, which existed primarily for itself and its own security. This chapter explores three alternatives to the Westphalian state, at the intersection of political and intellectual history. A ’Wilsonian imperium’ posited a world governed by a transnational community of liberal citizens that would regulate state behaviour. The state would remain an institutionalised locus of sovereignty, but all states would be guided by a common moral compass. At first, a ’Bolshevik imperium’ envisaged world revolution, which eventually would be able to dispense with the Westphalian state altogether. However, in the process of winning the civil war, the Bolsheviks began to turn the former imperial Russia into a unique species of imperial state, which never wholly renounced the ideological goals of the Bolshevik imperium. The successor state appeared to resemble the Westphalian state, in its fixation of borders and security. However, it rested on new and unstable foundations – the imperative to maximise and naturalse both ethnic and historical boundaries. In complementary ways, Max Weber and Carl Schmitt opened up a space in the theory of successor state sovereignty that could be occupied by the race, or Volk. No reimagining of state sovereignty after the Great War did more to disrupt and ultimately overthrow the interwar international system.

This chapter considers the Soviet conception and implementation of a highly distinctive scheme of social rights from its foundation in the 1920s through the 1960s to the 1980s. The state which ostensibly took those rights to their highest degree of realisation in the twentieth century presents a particularly instructive history, but one that destabilises and confounds received categories and trajectories. As heirs to the emancipatory ambitions of eighteenth-century Jacobins and nineteenth-century labour movements, the Bolsheviks pursued a highly distinctive mode of conceptualising and implementing social and economic protection. Fraught and contradictory, it encompassed sweeping labour protection and ruthless labour repression. Its unmatched scope and depth of social provision was marred by problematic enforcement, backstopping and justiciability, the state conceiving itself as having transcended both the market and social classes. The Soviet Constitution eschewed ‘class-abatement’ (which T. H. Marshall espoused) as the objective of social welfare, while also rejecting the notion that social rights should be actionable (contra the Weimar jurists’ ‘social rule of law’).