Abstract
The Russian Revolution of October 1917 came as a shock to orthodox Marxists. The traditional doctrines of historical materialism held that a proletarian revolution could succeed only in a nation that had already seen the rise of advanced capitalism and the growth of the bourgeoisie. Backward Russia, still ruled by an absolutist Tsar and lacking a substantial bourgeois population, seemed an unlikely site for a successful communist uprising. The idea that both the imperial and the bourgeois classes might be overturned in a single stroke was unheard of in most Marxist circles. Indeed, the earlier February Revolution of 1917 conformed more closely to the usual Marxist predictions. The overthrow of the Tsar and establishment of a Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky could be seen as a necessary step toward a takeover by the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, and a proper proletarian revolution would follow after the internal contradictions of bourgeois capitalism reached its crisis point. So when the minority Bolshevik faction of the Russian Socialist movement accomplished the seemingly impossible by seizing power and declaring the birth of a Soviet state, they also unleashed a flood of utopian sentiments, fantastic visions of a dawning socialist paradise.
Since the foundation of the Soviet Republics, the states of the world have been divided into two camps: the camp of capitalism and the camp of socialism . There, in the camp of capitalism: national hate and inequality, colonial slavery and chauvinism, national oppression and massacres, brutalities and imperialistic wars. Here, in the camp of socialism : reciprocal confidence and peace, national liberty and equality, the pacific co-existence and fraternal collaboration of peoples.
—Declaration of the Founding of the USSR , 30 December 1922 (Preamble to First Constitution of Soviet Union, January 1924, https://faculty.unlv.edu/pwerth/Const-USSR-1924(abridge).pdf, last accessed 12 May 2017.)
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Sikes, A. (2020). Conclusion: Socialized Maternity and Other Utopian Notions. In: Sex, Class, and the Theatrical Archive. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23116-3_5
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