Harry Sloan

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that the completion of the revolution would jeopardise their power and relative wealth..

In a ravaged economy which still had not repaired the war damage, let alone taken strides towards alleviating prerevolutionary poverty, there was no short-term prospect of eliminating shortages and want: and under such conditions a state buteaucracy, to administer and distribute the inadequate supplies available, remained firmly entrenched.

This was very different from the kind of state power envisaged by Marx or by Lenin as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx never anticipated a proletarian revolution taking place first in a backward country; and Lenin had anticipated that such problems could be resolved by a rapid extension of the revolution into industrialised Germany and throughout Europe.

In the event, a distorred and isolated Soviet Union was confronted with a burgeoning and authoritarian state bureaucracy, quite the opposite of the type of transitional 'dying state' advocated by Marx and Lenin, which would fade away with ihe elimination of"material want, and in which all officials would be elected and subject to recall at any time, and paid no more than the average wage.

Lenin had stressed the need for "immediate transfer to a regime in which all will fulfil the functions of control and supervision, so that all may for a time become 'bureaucrats', and therefore nobody can become à bureaucrat".

These proposals in 'State and Revolution' stemmed directly from the lessons Kadar, Andropov, But plainly the emergent, privileged bureaucracy had no interest in such mass, participatory democracy. Even before Lenin's illness and death in 1923-4 they had acquired a mighty power, with their hands on key levers of the state machine. After 1924 their position, championed by Joseph Stalin,