“In essence, the entire question of control amounts to who controls whom, that is, which class is the controller and which the controlled.”
—LeninOn the first anniversary of the October Revolution, Lenin admitted to the Sixth Congress of Soviets that a year earlier he had been well aware that workers' control of industry would be “chaotic, shattering, primitive, incomplete.” He had known that the syndicalist flood which burst upon Russia in the spring of 1917 would have to be controlled before it engulfed the revolution itself. Nevertheless, for several weeks after the Bolshevik rise to power, the new regime fostered workers' control in the factories with the aim of consolidating popular support.