ABSTRACT
This chapter describes about how state and party leaders, rank-and-file Bolsheviks, workers, and peasants conceptualized and worked between 1917 and 1927 to build a proletarian state. Bolsheviks and other Marxists often turned to a Marxist-inflected reading of the past to try to make sense of the present and prepare for the future. The Soviet state's first decrees committed it to the speedy delivery of two key Bolshevik demands: peace and land. The Decree on Land, which largely coopted the program of the Socialist Revolutionaries, ratified actions already taken by the peasants, authorizing the seizure of landed estates as well as crown and church lands without compensation to the previous owners. A decade after 1917, the Soviet state was a long way from the "socialist order" Lenin had promised to build at once. By early 1921, Soviet power reigned over much of the territory of the former Russian empire.
