Middle class intellectuals in particular were frustrated by their inability to find advancement in the Tsarist bureaucracy. As children of noblemen brought up by serf domestics on the estate, many of them felt a special personal sense of guilt. Nearly all of these radical intellectuals were acutely conscious of their wealth and privilege.
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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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