In February 1917, bread riots in Petrograd became a general strike, the strike became a soldiers' mutiny, and within a week the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty had abdicated. Eight months later, in October, a small Marxist faction led by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov — who called himself Lenin — overthrew the provisional government in something closer to a coup than a revolution and announced the world's first workers' state. Almost no one outside their own ranks expected them to last six months. They lasted seventy-four years.
What the Bolsheviks built was something the world had never seen: a state that took an abstract economic theory — Marxism, drafted in 19th-century reading rooms by a German philosopher writing in the British Library — and tried to use it as the operating manual for a continental empire. The cost was extraordinary. A civil war that killed perhaps eight million. Forced collectivization in the 1930s that killed several million more. Stalin's purges. The Gulag. The deliberate famine in Ukraine. By the standards the Bolsheviks set themselves — the elimination of class inequality, the withering of the state — they failed. By the standards of raw industrial capacity, they took an illiterate peasant economy and, in three decades, built the country that eventually beat the Wehrmacht and put a satellite into orbit. The Soviet experiment is the largest, most expensive, and most consequential failure of utopian politics in human history.
Every contemporary debate about state capacity, about how much a government can plan, about whether ideology can substitute for prices, runs back to the Soviet case. The 20th-century answer was decisive but bought at a cost that shaped every continent.