ABSTRACT
The Russian Revolution excited men. It captured their imaginations. The Russian Revolution seemed to herald the fulfillment of the nineteenth-century socialist movement. The chapter emphasizes that the importance of the bridge between the social democratic intelligentsia and the worker elites, and the workers themselves, cannot be minimized. It highlights the difference between the workers and the peasants. The chapter shows that the worker was politically oriented and committed to social democracy, and was not just seeking bread-and-butter wage gains. The traditional observation of Western and Soviet scholars has been that, after 1903—except for short spurts—the Bolsheviks were a secondary force, though Lenin indeed enjoyed great prestige. The labor movement, which had been pushing for a democratic alternative, turned against the Bolsheviks soon after 1917, and labor opposition left the Bolsheviks at the crossroads of history.
