The Consolidation of the Soviet Union, 1917–1929

After the October Revolution, Lenin pointed out that the new order would have to be constructed from the bricks of the old. If the tsarist government had condoned primitive savagery, the Communist successor which he now headed could not immediately enjoy completely civilised brotherhood. Many concessions would have to be made to the inertia of the past. The transformation was made even more difficult through the circumstance that the embryonic Soviet Union found itself continually surrounded by hostile powers which wished its great experiment no success at all. And so, while it never forgot the major cause of the international revolution, Lenin’s government was mortally afraid for its own survival and brought the historic Russian fear of invasion to a high pitch of intensity. Moreover, since the Civil War and Intervention weakened the proletariat before it was able to fully establish its dictatorship, the Communist Party found itself increasingly bound to act as a substitute for it. In this substitution, as well as in the later neglect of the international revolution, many critics find the beginning of the bureaucratisation which was in their view completely to negate the dictatorship of the proletariat in favour of the Party and then of a single individual, Stalin.