by
The Russian Revolution of 1917 erupted on the fiftieth anniversary
of the publication of Karl Marx’s Capital. From the
start, the October Revolution seemed both to confirm and contradict Marx’s
analysis. He had envisioned a working-class-based socialist revolution breaking
out in the developed capitalist countries of Western Europe. But the 1882
preface to the Communist Manifesto, written a year
before his death, amended this by pointing to a revolution in Russia as a
possible “signal for proletarian revolution in the West.”1 Yet although a worker-peasant revolution under Marxist
leadership triumphed in Russia in 1917, Russia was still a largely
underdeveloped country, and the revolutionary uprisings in Germany and Central
Europe which followed were weak and easily extinguished.
In these
circumstances, Soviet Russia, completely isolated, faced a massive
counterrevolution, with all the major imperialist powers intervening on the
side of the White Russian forces in the Civil War. “Socialism in one country,”
the basic defensive posture of the USSR throughout its history, was thus to a
large extent a geopolitical reality imposed on it from outside. This was
evident beginning with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, in which Russia was forced
to give up much of the territory of the Tsarist Empire, followed soon after by
the Treaty of Versailles, which sought to isolate it still further.
