Russia unbound

The October Revolution is usually considered to be the beginning of an anti-democratic and non-constitutional totalitarian type of regime. One can point to the most obvious consequences such as the monopolisation of all means of power in the hands of a revolutionary party, the seizure of control of all economic, state administrative, juridical, and cultural institutions, and the institutionalisation of revolutionary terror through the Cheka, the secret police established by the Bolshevik regime in December 1917. While this has been an accepted view in political history and comparative politics, its judgement is based on outcome-logic, which has dominated the two major interpretations of the October Revolution. On the one hand, the focus was on the chain of unpredictable and rather situational factors that made this unique constellation of power seizure through the Bolsheviks possible. Critical of the social foundations of the Bolshevik Revolution, such a view claimed that the Soviet totalitarian state was not a society but an ideocratic regime that could not have emerged without Lenin's personal will power. Conversely, there has been the central assumption about a causality according to which the revolution was the inevitable result of the class struggle between the underprivileged classes (workers and peasants) and the bourgeoisie.