As we have seen, a crucial factor influencing Murphy's, and the Communist Party's, political development was the role of the Comintern based in Moscow. In turn, underlying the Comintern's role was the changing nature of the Russian workers’ state in the first few years after the 1917 revolution. Indeed, it is impossible to fully understand the way in which Murphy and the CP operated inside Britain without placing their activities within the much broader context of the rise to power of the Stalinist bureaucracy inside the Russian state.

From the moment of its victory the Russian revolution had faced severe difficulties. Marx and Engels had been clear that a socialist revolution could not be confined to one country because sooner or later it would be overcome by the pressure of world capitalism. Lenin, Trotsky and the other leaders of the Russian revolution shared this view, recognising that the economic backwardness of the USSR and its small working class in a predominantly peasant population would make the building of socialism especially difficult, and that everything depended on spreading the revolution to other more advanced capitalist countries. But the international revolution, although it came close to success in a number of European countries, failed to materialise, and the Russian revolution was left on its own. This enabled international capitalism to foment a terrible civil war in Russia between 1918 and 1921. So it was that a working class of just three million out of a total population of 160 million, racked by famine and strangled by an international blockade, faced 14 invading armies and domestic counter-revolution from the old ruling class. By the most extraordinary efforts the Red Army was victorious, but at an appalling cost. The country lay in ruins, industry was devastated and the working class, the class that had made the revolution, was effectively decimated with hundreds of thousands of the most politically conscious workers killed in the civil war. The working class lost the capacity it had established in October 1917 to directly control the newly formed state. In this situation, the ruling Communist Party, though its members still thought of themselves as Marxist, became transformed into an unaccountable bureaucracy standing above the working class. By 1921 what had emerged was, to use Lenin's words, ‘A workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations’.