Only One Year

Abstract

Lenin founded a state on principles different from any which had existed. There had been states committed to a single militant ideology. This had been the case not only throughout the expansionist Muslim world in the era after Mohammed’s death but also in the countries which rejected Catholicism for Protestantism in the sixteenth century. But no such state had been secular in avowed purpose, totally and aggressively anti-religious. Nor had any of them been dominated, as was Soviet Russia, by a single mass political party. The Bolsheviks were awesome pioneers in this respect as in many others. The ‘party-state’ was their invention.