The Russian revolution in October 1917 gave the workers', soldiers' and peasants' soviets full state power. It swept away the bourgeois state. Subsequent successful seizures of power in the name of the workers have involved either peasant armies led by working class political nuclei or, disastrously, the occupation of countries by the forces of the Russian workers' state. The bureaucratic leaders of European workers thwarted the spread of the revolution. The isolated Stalinist bureaucracy produced a consolatory myth: that Russia did not need such foreign victories because it would achieve...