ABSTRACT
The history of Soviet socialism is inextricably caught up in the wider history of socialism as a political concept. The formation of a Soviet “model” of socialism after 1917 was a function of the collision of the ideas of socialism forged within Russian social democracy after 1883 with the hard reality of the Russian sociopolitical environment. Yet the notion of socialism which informed the postrevolutionary thinking of the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP hereafter) was itself the product of decades of Russian and European intellectual and historical development. The tensions and contradictions within socialism as both a political doctrine and a political movement, were reproduced and given specific form by their interpretation and translation into Russian conditions at the turn of the century. It is important to note that while Soviet socialism comprised a particular cluster of wider socialist values and perspectives, it was itself a complex, pluralistic phenomenon, with a good deal of internal diversity. Locating the historical and intellectual origins of Soviet socialism begins in the eighteenth century.
