The Russian Revolution in Today's Perspective
“We shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order” announced Lenin to the Congress of Soviets early on the morning of November 8th, 1917. He had prepared no blueprint from which to work, and forty years later, writes Ernest Bock, the structure of the Soviet state is very different from that which its founder envisaged.
A Tsarist general, arrested in Petrograd—today’s Leningrad—in the first hours of the victorious Communist uprising forty years ago, sank down exhausted upon a chair and, turning to a fellow-prisoner, said: “Countess, we are witnessing the death of a great country.”
The general’s view, quoted by Trotsky in his History of the Russian Revolution, was for many years shared by the world. It has since been thoroughly refuted by developments; and Russia’s astonishing transformation, within so short a span of time, into the second industrial power of the world is today widely regarded as the outstanding event of the century. Yet the British Government in 1919, in their first White Paper on Bolshevism in Russia, thus summed up their finding:
“...one is forced to the conclusion that the measures inaugurated by the Bolsheviks, and the means by which they are applied, can have but one end—the bankruptcy of Government and the country.”
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