ABSTRACT
Socialism and Marxism are nineteenth-century phenomena, and they share a political base quite different from the conservative base. If conservatism began in the heat of political involvement and was central to decision making in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, socialism and, even more profoundly, World War I was the great defeat of western types of socialism. The early movement and the mood of this time are ably described in first volume, The Bolshevik Revolution. A brief comparison of the ineptitude in handling the agrarian sector offers clear evidence of this transformation of socialism from a doctrine of economic equities to a dogma of political priorities. The emergence of bureaucratic socialism produced a profound de-politicalization of Soviet society. The control of the army was indeed in the hands of the masses in whose name the revolution was made. But over the long run, and certainly by the end of the Lenin period, a professional armed force had been consolidated.
