ABSTRACT
It is impossible to understand the Russian Revolution and the society that emerged from it without understanding Lenin and his political incarnation, the Bolshevik Party. Lenin recoiled from anything that might postpone the socialist revolution, be it economic prosperity and social reform. Lenin therefore, while still professing Marxism, wound up trying to circumvent the Marxist tenet that Russia had to have a bourgeois revolution and a subsequent lengthy period of capitalist development before it would be ready for its socialist revolution. Both his concept of that party and the way he operated it quickly made Lenin the focus of bitter controversy. He eventually concluded that special conditions arising both in Russia and abroad had made it possible for Russia to begin its socialist revolution before socialist revolutions broke out in the industrialized countries of the West. A final theoretical guidepost to Lenin's shortcut to socialist revolution in Russia-his analysis of the state-did not require any modification of classical Marxism.
