Lenin In Power

Before the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia, Lenin had been confident that conditions in the country were right for a socialist revolution, and that a socialist economic system could be established on the basis of the structures which Russian capitalism had already laid down. He also expected to be able to implement the conception of a‘commune state’ that he had elaborated in State and Revolution. Once the Bolsheviks had taken power, however, Lenin’s prerevolutionary vision of Russia’s future very rapidly evaporated, and the country gravitated more and more towards the repression and authoritarian rule that Russians had thought superseded with the end of the tsarist regime. One reason for this outcome is that any plans that Lenin had turned out to be entirely inadequate to deal with the situation as it then existed, and the other is that even those plans were based on misconceptions about how capitalism developed and what the nature of Russian society was.