The Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 brought the world's first socialist government to power. Many definitions of socialism: for most, (and in its broadest meaning) it designates an alternative method to capitalism for organizing the economy. It thus refers to concrete inst'l arrangements and programs. However, in practice, the usage of the term "socialism" is more than benign insts. The market is held to be anarchic and the plan is rational and these things generate a normative bias. Socialism means collectivism as opposed to individualism, cooperation as opposed to competition, service rather than profit, and altruism rather than greed. Thus socialism means a just and humane society and therefore becomes a moral term. In his book "The Soviet Tragedy", Martin Malia writes of the unique character of socialism:

Socialism is a quasi-magical term; in fact is has often been claimed that the more ardent forms of socialism have something of a secular religion about them. Masses of humanity could once surge though Red Square chanting "forward to the victory of socialism!" but it is quite inconceivable that shareholders should march down Wall Street mouthing such rousing slogans about capitalism."

Many have argued that the world's first socialist regime could not have come to power in any county other than Russia. One explanation is that the despotism and servitude of old Russia simply reproduced themselves in socialist form. The other, more sophisticated, explanation looks to an empirically documented line of transmission from Ivan to Peter to Lenin to Stalin. Gerschenkron argued that the farther east in Europe one goes, the more agrarian and backward societies become, and thus, the faster the pace at which they must catch up with a constantly rising standard of modernity set by the western edge of the continent. Under these circumstances, the only possible agent for such accelerated transformation is the state. Modern Russia's backwardness was all encompassing- economic, social, political, and cultural. It was a natural setting for a "proletarian revolution" led by a vanguard elite.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was born in 1870 from a background of modest gentry. He became a revolutionary by the usual path to that vocation: a conflict between youthful idealism and disaffection from the system's abuses of power. The result of Lenin's reading of Marx was the creation of one of the most extraordinary political institutions of all time: the Communist Party. From the beginning of his early revolutionary days in 1902 until the Great October Revolution itself, Lenin construed Marxism in a manner that still contained its formal tenets but allowed for a recasting of history to accommodate for Russia's backwardness. Because Marx had argued that socialism can only be evolved FROM capitalism, the Bolsheviks (the more leftist of the Communist Party factions- the other was the Mensheviks, who were all but dissolved by 1917) found themselves arguing that the period from 1905-1906 when Russia was a "constitutional democracy" represented this period of Westernism.

The revolution itself was an evolutionary process that began in February 1917 with the Petrograd factory workers. In the last days of the month worker protests against food shortages escalated into industrial strikes and finally into mass political demonstrations against the war and the autocracy. The unrest became revolution when the Petrograd garrison of peasant soldiers refused to fire on the crowds, thus depriving the capital of power. Soon after, the Progressive Bloc of the Duma stepped in to form a provisional government in an effort to stabilize the situation. When this usurpation of power was approved by the army high command, Czar Nicholas was abdicated and the old regime collapsed like a house of cards. Alongside the provisional government was formed the first Soviet (or Council) of Workers and Soldiers Deputies, upon whom the provisional government depended for support (it was, after all, their mutiny that brought the Duma Bloc to power.) Among the first decrees of the first Soviet was "Order Number One" which democratized the army, neutralized the officer corps, and undermined the new government's control over its armed forces. The provisional govt, presided over by Kerenskii, lacked any real power, and was therefore nothing more than a provisional administration. As October 1917 approached, Lenin's Bolsheviks began to consolidate power in the Soviet and openly organized to toss the provisional govt, as Trotsky put it, into the trash heap of history. The October Revolution was an armed insurrection carried out by the Pary using the appartus of the Petrograd Soviet. Lenin insisted that the transfer of power take this militarized form rather than the political form of a vote, which was the course favored by his colleagues Kamenev and Zinoviev. For Lenin (as for Marx) the class struggle was literally class warfare and physical violence was necessary for the revolution to come to fruition. The task of organizing the insurrection fell to a man named Leon Trotsky who created something called the Military Revolutionary Committee (its members hand-picked by Trotsky) to carry out the actual takeover of the capital. In contrast to the mass political unrest that occurred in Februrary, this revolution was carried out by the amateur police operataion of the MRC, some sailors of the Baltic Fleet, and a handful of worker members of the Red Guard. Because there were no forces to fight for the Provisional Govt, the Bolsheviks had almost nothing to overthrow. As Lenin himself put it, the Party "found power lying the streets and simply picked it up."

Though the Bolsheviks entered power under the banner of socialism, and even more specifically, as the "vanguard of the proletariat", the working class itself never actually came to power. Instead, the revolutionaries formed a distinct political and ideological organization. In 1902 in "What is to be done?" Lenin called for "a party of new type", which was to be composed of full-time revolutionaries. He argued that the workers had to be informed and led by the conscious and scientific theory of the vanguard party. The Bolshevik Party was the vehicle which would lead mankind to the socialist ideal. Actual workers participated in the Party only insofar as they worked for a revolution and not for short-term economic gain (that is, in spirit). If a worker fell into the latter category, he ceased being authentic proletarian and became part of the "petty bourgeoisie." The Bolshevik world consisted of only two classes: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Lenin's party thus represented more of a metaphysical rather than and empirical proletariat and it was the primacy of "ideological consciousness" that drove his understanding of the class struggle and all of politics.

The first phase of Bolshevik power was defined as War Communism. In a sense, it was the war that had made the Bolshevik seizure of power possible, and now it would be war that would define the context within which Soviet institutions would be built. The true socialist believes that with the collapse of capitalism comes the necessary next stage: socialism. Lenin began making preparations for the advance towards socialism in Russia by imposing state control on the existing capitalist system while awaiting the European revolution that would make full socialism possible across the continent. However, the imperalist war was not ending, much less in socialist revolution, so by late 1918, when Lenin decided that Russia could not wait for history to catch up, the Party decided that socialism would have to be "built."

Lenin did two major things within the first three months after the revolution that would define the future development of Soviet rule. First, he started by established the Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle against Counterrevolution and Sabotage, commonly known as Cheka. Among the duties of the Cheka were to dispossess and supress the political activities of the former exploitative class: the bourgeoisie. The Cheka grew to be Lenin's primary vehicle for waging civil war against all class enemies of the state. Second, he managed, in effect, to "outlaw" any other political parties on the argument that they were not truly representative of the base of Soviet life and dissolved the Constituent Assembly, whose officials represented the last symbol of democratic elections that Russia would see for 74 years. By the end of 1918, the "Party State" was born. It is useful to note that the Party did not govern directly, but rather through an apparatus known as the "soviet". In this arrangement, real power was held by the Party, but at the local level, the soviet (which rested on the people) was the theoretical center of government.

By June 1918, Bolshevik Russia had been reduced to the area around Moscow (the capital had been moved there months earlier to be further from the front). For awhile it looked as though the revolutionary adventure would soon come to an end. However, the Party decided to reassert power by declaring civil war against the traitorious "whites" and implementing a brutal economic program meant to install a socialist order: war communism. In August 1918, the regime proclaimed a policy of Red Terror, which would be directed by the Cheka against all enemies of the people, of the Revolution, and of the Party. Simultaneously, the country faced a serious grain shortage, and the populations in the cities were beginning to starve. The government decreed nationalization of all industry between June and December 1918. As private property in industry and commerce was eradicated and profit was abolised, the basis for the exploitation of man by man (according to the Bols) had been overcome. Gosplan (the State Planning Commission) was created as a special unit for long term economic coordination. Gosplan was to make "rational" policy by ordering economic activity in real needs, not in terms of the anarchy of the market. What occurred in the years between 1918 and 1921 was what Malia calls "an extraordinary primitivization of Russian life: a near collapse of industrial production and an unprecedented reversion to a natural or barter economy." Control of the formal economy rested solely with the Party, and even the workers unions were transformed into agents of the party. Even the peasants' only leverage was refusal to deliver grain (which they quickly learned was not a viable option). The workers' and peasants' soviets were in fact largely transmission belts of the Party's will.

By the end of the war, it because clear that for the foreseeable future, the dictatorship of the proletariat would be locked up in a peasant, backward country. After 1922, the new state was organized as the Soviet Union and in territory, it was essentially the old Russian Empire minus some of its Western borderlands. As preparation for a world federation of socialist countries, the Party began a policy of supporting proletarian self-determinism. This policy led to civil war in most of the border states. The "whites" won in Finland and the Baltic states, which became independent, but in Ukraine, Transcaucasia, and eventually Central Asia, the Reds triumphed and those regions lost their independene by the early 1920s. The USSR was devised to accommodate this situation, which although not exactly a world federation, was more than just ethnic Russia. The official slogan came to be that the constitutent republics were "national in form, but socialist in content". The USSR adopted a federal structure which in theory allowed for ethnic autonomy and the official use of native languages. Behind the ethnic façade, however, the Party was in full control.

As it became clear that the Bolshevik policies of war communism had nearly brought the economy to ruin, workers and peasants began in 1921 to revolt. Output of mines and factories had fallen to 21% of pre-revolution level, and agricultural production was down to about 38% of normal. The working class had almost withered away so that there remained , according to Malia "a dictatorship without the proletariat." The Party's response to the crisis of 1921 was twofold. On one hand, it made significant concessions to the peasants and the market in order to revive production (this retreat was known as the New Economic Policy or NEP). On the other hand, the Party consolidated its political control over the country. While economic reigns loosened, political ones tightened. The NEP years are also significant because it was during this period that the struggle over who would become Lenin's successor was waged.

The NEP period became known in Soviet history as the "golden era". Indeed, it was the period in which Soviet citizens experienced the highest standard of living. It better than both the war communism that preceded it and the Stalinist terror that followed.

When Lenin died in early 1924, the world's most infamous struggle for power began. It is difficult to comprehend the brutality of intent behind Stalin's rule without a rudimentary knowledge of how he came to power over the six years between 1924 and 1929. Of the seven men elected as full members to the Politburo in June 1924, six would be killed by the lone survivor. This membership consisted of Zinoviev and Kamenev, Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky.

Back in 1919 the highest organs of Communist Party power had been formed in the Politburo (the center of party power and decision-making) and the Orgburo (concerned with party organization and administration). In 1919, Joseph Stalin was elected by the Party to both of these bodies, this on top of administering the Nationalities Commissariat. When it was suggested that no one could carry out all of Stalin's party responsibilities, Lenin replied that no one could name another suitable candidate other than Comrade Stalin. Upon Lenin's death, Leon Trotsky , Stalin's primary rival and a Politburo member was in a strong position. Stalin had offended Lenin by speaking roughly to his wife and as a consequence, Lenin wrote Stalin a letter demanding his apology or a breaking off of relations. Lenin had been wary of Stalin for sometime- calling him "rude", "ignorant", and "unscrupoluous". It is said that right before he died, Lenin told his wife that "Stalin is devoid of the most elementary honesty, the most simply human honesty." Trotsky, on the other hand, had a number of distinguished supporters, a power base in the army, and a large following among the younger members of the party. But he seems to have had little understanding of political tactics. Comrade Zinoviev, (another Politburo member) on the other hand, saw himself as the leading figure in the party and next General Secretary. He perceived Trotsky as the only real threat, and what came to be known as the "triumvirate" or "troika" opposing Trotsky began to emerge, which Kamenev and Stalin standing with Zinoviev. Eventually, the troika was able to convince most the Central Committee that Trotsky was a traitor to the regime and the vision of Lenin Stalin was elected as provisional General Secretary until the new power structure could be worked out.

Zinoviev and Kamenev controlled the party machines in Leningrad and Moscow, respectively. They represented a large stratum of traditionalist leftist Bolsheviks who had reservations about the more peripheral figure of Stalin. Among their supporters was Lenin's widow, Krupskaya. On the "right" were Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, and Mikhail Tomsky. Bukharin, whom Lenin called "the golden boy of the party" was an intellectual in the sense Zinoviev was not. Rykov had succeeded Lenin as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and was more in the Kamenev mold. Tomsky was an actual worker and was now in charge of the trade unions.