As the October Revolution’s centenary unfolded in 2017, a steady stream of celebratory essays appeared in left-wing publications like Jacobin, explaining the nature of and cause of this epochal event. All agreed that the first workers’ revolution was a popular movement, not a coup d’état. Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, a political organization with deep roots in the Russian proletariat, led it to victory.

“All Power to the Soviets” realized a workers’ state, grounded in Soviet democracy. Elected factory committees became the primary organ of workers’ control on the shop floor, the main institution for advancing their interests at the point of production. In the countryside, millions of peasants seized the land from the nobility and redistributed it among themselves, fulfilling an age-old dream. Such, in the briefest of terms, was the triumphant rise of the Russian Revolution.

But soon thereafter began a prolonged and agonizing descent into a monstrous despotism, a descent treated in somber postscripts appended to narratives of triumph. The outbreak of civil war in 1918 prompted the Bolsheviks to adopt a complex of policies, collectively known as War Communism, to defend the October Revolution against armed counterrevolutionaries, supported by foreign imperialist powers. But the salient features of War Communism — forced requisitioning of grain from the peasantry, the Red Terror, hostage-taking, collective punishments, labor conscription — diverted the revolution from its original democratic and egalitarian goals.