Introduction: the problem of Soviet socialism

Few would deny that the Bolshevik Revolution was a “world historical event” in the Hegelian–Marxist sense. November 7, 1917, was “a day that shook the world.” Not only did it occasion the fall of the moribund Czarist autocracy, but it appeared to mark the ascendancy of a new social order in which the welfare of the “toiling masses” would supersede the minority interests of the nobility, or property-owning classes. Certainly, the Bolsheviks construed their own actions in these terms, proclaiming without reservation that their triumph would usher in a new era of (Marxist) socialism, followed ineluctably by full communism.

This ecstatic characterization, however, was vehemently contested not just by those who flourished under Czarism – the nobility and the bourgeoisie – but by a large spectrum of socialist dissent. Anarchists, populists, Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, suppressed, interned in concentration camps (by mid-1918), and not infrequently “exed” (executed by the Revolutionary Tribunal) rejected what seemed to them to be a perversion of the very social ideals that the Bolsheviks so fervidly professed. Leninist socialism, although it may have possessed some attributes of a legitimate socialist order (nationalization of the means of production, a working-class ideology, abolition of market relations, etc.), nonetheless from the dissenters' standpoint was inimical to other higher socialist ideals, the welfare of the masses, democracy, due process, civil liberties, and authentic socialist consciousness.