Land policy must be carried out by an apparatus that has not grasped the tasks and ideas of Soviet construction in the countryside and that is riddled with elements that are alien and even hostile to Soviet power.
—N. M. Shvernik, section chief, People’s Commissariat of Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, 1924“Anyone who reads the letters that passed between the Intendants and their superiors or subordinates,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, “cannot fail to be struck by the family likeness between the government officials of the past and those of modern France.” He added that not only the personnel and institutions but even the internal bureaucratic terminology of the old regime was similar to that of postrevolutionary, republican France. Despite their obsession with the French Revolution, Russia’s revolutionary rulers had probably not read Tocqueville’s cautionary tale about the persistence of the old-regime state. If they had, they might have learned quite a bit.