ABSTRACT
As Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev battled unsuccessfully to preserve the Soviet Union in the months following the failed coup of August 1991, he repeatedly mentioned the "socialist choice" of 1917. This was a reference to the Soviet Union's birth in one of the major revolutions of the twentieth century. After the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd in 1917, the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilich Lenin declared, "we must now set about building a proletarian socialist state in Russia." 1
