As we have seen, a crucial factor influencing Murphy's, and the Communist Party's, political development was the role of the Comintern based in Moscow. In turn, underlying the Comintern's role was the changing nature of the Russian workers' state in the first few years after the 1917 revolution. Indeed, it is impossible to fully understand the way in which Murphy and the CP operated inside Britain without placing their activities within the much broader context of the rise to power of the Stalinist bureaucracy inside the Russian state.

From the moment of its victory the Russian revolution had faced severe difficulties. Marx and Engels had been clear that a socialist revolution could not be confined to one country because sooner or later it would be overcome by the pressure of world capitalism. Lenin, Trotsky and the other leaders of the Russian revolution shared this view, recognising that the economic backwardness of the USSR and its small working class in a predominantly peasant population would make the building of socialism especially difficult, and that everything depended on spreading the revolution to other more advanced capitalist countries. But the international revolution, although it came close to success in a number of European countries, failed to materialise, and the Russian revolution was left on its own. This enabled international capitalism to foment a terrible civil war in Russia between 1918 and 1921.