In the 19th century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was famously a sort of Christian anarchist. And his ideas did have many adherents in Russia, and around the world. Peasants tended to conceive of land as something that could only belong to God, or to nobody, or to the state. They tended to imagine the state as a giant commune of communes similar to the ideas for anarchist federations.
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The leaders of the Russian Revolutions of February and October 1917 sought to establish socialism: a deeply democratic economic and political system where the employee/employer relationship is abolished, and where workers control their workplaces, the means of production and the government via the “free association of the producers”.
Instead the revolutions resulted in the establishment of the Soviet Union: an authoritarian state where the government became the sole employer and the state controlled the workers instead of the other way around.This then became the model for “communist” countries around the world.
Why did the Soviet Union fail at socialism?
What can we learn about this failure to apply to our political struggles in the present and future?
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