A revolutionary movement which, like the Bolsheviks', aspired to the total transformation of society, might be expected to destroy and replace the whole institutional network of the existing state – not only its political nucleus, but also its central administrative machine and even its field units throughout the country. Such root-and branch changes were, on the face of it, part of Lenin's vision. In his pamphlet The State and Revolution, written only a few weeks before the seizure of power, while arguing that the victorious proletariat would require a state of its own in order to prepare the conditions under which state power could ultimately ‘wither away’, Lenin nevertheless asserted that his would be an entirely new non-bureaucratic form of state after the style of the Paris Commune, erected on the ashes of the old state institutions which would have to be utterly shattered and swept away.