Introduction: Illiberal Liberation, 1917-41

In 1917, the Bolsheviks promised to liberate the working masses of the Russian Empire from a repressive and exploitative system. Within two decades, they had established a system that was even more dictatorial and coercive than the one they had overthrown. The question of how a regime that promised ultimate liberation ended up delivering a violent dictatorship has been at the core of Soviet studies since its emergence as a discipline. The earliest literature, which coalesced around Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski’s ‘totalitarian model’ asserted that the drive to dictatorship was in the Bolshevik DNA and that the Bolsheviks, a small, unrepresentative and already or embryonically totalitarian party, usurped power and imposed itself by force on the population in October 1917. From that moment on, Soviet politics and society were determined by the totalitarian dynamics of the monolithic Communist Party, with its dictatorial nature, ruthlessness, ideological orthodoxy, programmatic dogmatism, ultra-discipline and centralized bureaucratic organization. In the hostile climate of the Cold War, American democracy in the United States was presented as ‘government by the will of the people’ in contrast to ‘government against the will of the people’ in the USSR....