ABSTRACT
The October Revolution changed the world and shook the existing order to its foundations. During the early years of the revolution, in the late 1940s, the late 1950s and during the mid 1970s it appeared to many of its competitors first and foremost the United States that Soviet power was on the march and might challenge successfully for world leadership. The State which set out to abolish the State failed to evolve a society capable of constructing an economy which was able to satisfy the aspirations of its members. In the Soviet Union since the market was taboo it was replaced by the bureaucratic market. There were two main sources of capital for the huge amounts of investment needed in the 1930s: foreign financial institutions and the Soviet people. Stalin, a Great Russian nationalist, knew that religion, nationalism and regionalism could destroy his revolution from above. The Soviet economy favoured monopoly and specialisation.
