Bhaskar Sunkara

A lot of this 3% of the population has died in war and half of them supported the Mensheviks and the more moderate socialists anyway.

But

the alternative in their minds was going to be a far-right reaction, some sort of general taking power in a coup or whatever else, or just them ending up back in prison, because a lot of them were in prison under the Tsar, or just killed.

So they figured, all right, we're going to have a holding action where we maintain as much of this territory of the old Russian Empire as possible.

And

will try to slowly implement changes, restabilize the economy through something called a new economic program, which was kind of a form of social democracy, if you will, because it allowed market exchange for the peasants combined with state ownership of industries in the cities.

And

For a while, it seemed to be working.

The revolution never came that they were expecting in Western Europe.

But in Russia itself, they were able to restabilize things by the middle or end of the 1920s.

And they were able to build more of a popular base for some of their policies because people who had seen the chaos of World War I and revolution and then civil war kind of just wanted stability.

And

After a decade plus of war, if you had a government that was able to give you enough to eat and a job, you know, that was good enough for them.

Then Stalin came into power, and he wanted to rapidly industrialize.

And his logic was, the revolution is not going to come in the West.

We need to build socialism in one country.

And we need to catch up with the West.

We need to turn ourselves into an industrial powerhouse as quickly as possible.

And that's where you got forced collectivization to try to increase the productivity of Russian agriculture through state ownership of previously fragmented agricultural holdings and through the implementation of mechanization, so bringing in more machines to make agriculture more productive, all under state ownership, plus more ambitious attempts to build heavy industry through five-year plans.

Now,