ABSTRACT
The Bolshevik party prepared and insured the October victory. The victory of the Thermidorians over the Jacobins in the eighteenth century was also aided by the weariness of the masses and the demoralization of the leading cadres, but beneath the essentially incidental phenomena a deep organic process was taking place. Russia’s historical evolution originated in the interaction between internal conditions and the external threat — and not, as is often assumed in discussions of Russian history or Stalinism, in the internal dynamics of Russian state and society alone. The final solution envisaged by the imperial German army command in 1918 threatened the very existence of the Russian empire as a polity; the memory of this solution dominated Joseph Stalin’s revolution. Stalin can be understood only in the full context of global power politics, as viewed from the all-inclusive perspective and with the impartial detachment befitting an interdependent world.
