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One hundred years ago in wartime Petrograd, American journalist John Reed witnessed the October Revolution. In his classic account, Ten Days that Shook the World, he describes a crowded, smoke-filled hall in Smolny Institute where delegates to the Second Congress of Soviets had gathered. After the Bolshevik seizure of power, Vladimir Lenin mounted the podium to a tremendous ovation and pronounced his famous words: "We shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order!"1In the shadow of the First World War, the ideals of socialism offered hope for a more just and harmonious society. According to Reed: "On earth [the Russian people] were building a kingdom more bright than any heaven had to offer."2But the promise of "the Great Socialist Experiment" was never fulfilled. The Soviet system resulted not in a communist utopia but instead in a Stalinist dictatorship, with extreme levels of state intervention and violence.
Lenin's proclamation implied that Soviet state structures would be socialist. But he purposely elided an important fact--never before in history had there been a socialist state, and there was no blueprint of how to construct one. While Bolshevik leaders rejected liberal democracy and called for "all power to the soviets," they had no plan for socialist state building. Instead they drew upon pre-existing state practices--practices of social cataloguing and intervention that had arisen in western Europe during the nineteenth century and had become increasingly coercive during the First World War. Recent scholarship has highlighted similarities between the Soviet Union and other modern states. Scholars have shown, for example, that Russian and Soviet ethnographers' tabulation of ethnic groups was a part of an international trend toward using population statistics as a tool of government.3Another scholar has demonstrated that interventionist features of Soviet rule, including surveillance and grain requisitioning, had been practiced by governments across Europe during the First World War.4Other studies have compared Soviet population management with parallel efforts in a range of twentieth-century states.5Soviet methods of rule, then, were not uniquely "socialist" and instead reflected modern forms of governance.
At the same time, the Soviet Union clearly did not fit the western European model of nation-states, parliamentary...