Lenin the Revolution Besieged 1923 (v. 3)

When on the day after the October insurrection of 1917 Lenin calmly declared: 'We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order,' he stood at a turning point of world history. But Lenin and the Bolshevik Party were under no illusions about the hard road ahead; just four months later he told the Congress of Soviets: 'The final victory of socialism in one country is of course impossible....It is the absolute truth that without a German revolution we are doomed.' These are the twin themes of this book by Tony Cliff: the struggle of the Russian workers to build a worker's state in a country racked by foreign invasion and civil war, while Lenin and the Bolsheviks worked to spread socialist revolution beyond Russia. In the short time available, their successes were astonishing; but the failures were decisive. The Bolsheviks never doubted the crucial role of the working class in the revolution and in building socialism, but the end of the war saw the working class disintegrated and the revolution isolated. So the vacuum developed which led to the consolidation of the power of the bureaucracy, a process against which Lenin fought even with his dying breath.