Introduction

Abstract

When the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia in October 1917 they knew only the outlines of the society that they wished to build. Although Karl Marx talked of the working class having ‘no ideals to realise, but to set free the elements of the new society’,¹ he provided a broad outline of what the communist project would entail. These reflected a vision of man and society and of the process of change itself. On coming to power in October 1917 the Bolsheviks debated the options and chose policies within the Marxist framework. Marx’s aversion to blueprints of the future society was shared by the Bolsheviks, but the latter, in the heat of a revolution conducted within the framework of Marx’s social analysis of capitalist society, were forced to face up to the problem of applying the general principles of Marxism to a country which of all the major European states was perhaps the least prepared economically and politically for the attempt.