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Ideas play a part in any revolution, but the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917--the one that changed \"Russia\" into the \"U.S.S.R.\"--was noteworthy for being principally inspired by one idea. It was a revolution consciously made in the name of one class (the working class, the \"proletariat\") and against another class (the owners, the \"bourgeoisie\"). The Revolution was made by men who believed with Karl Marx that the whole history of the world was the history of a struggle between classes--between oppressors and oppressed.
Marx, like other socialist thinkers of the 19th century, denounced the cruel injustices of industrial capitalist society as he saw it. He had a vision of ending \"the exploitation of man by man\" and establishing a classless society, in which all people would be equal. The only means to this end, he thought, was a revolution of the exploited (the proletariat) against the exploiters (the bourgeoisie), so that workers would own the means of production, such as the factories and machinery. This revolution would set up a \"dictatorship of the proletariat\" to do away with the old bourgeois order (the capitalist system) and eventually replace it with a classless society.
Lenin took this idea and further focused on the role of the Communist Party as the leader of the working class.
When Lenin reached Russia in 1917 a first revolution against the crumbling regime of the Czar had already taken place. The new government was democratic, but \"bourgeois.\" Lenin victoriously headed the radical socialist (Bolshevik) revolution in October of that year. This was immediately followed by four years of bloody civil war: the Revolution\'s Red Army, organized and led by Leon Trotsky, had to defeat the \"Whites\" (Russians loyal to the Czar or just hostile to the Communists) and foreign troops, too.
At Lenin\'s death in 1924, there was a struggle between Joseph Stalin and Trotsky for leadership of the Communist Party and thus of the nation. In 1925, Stalin clearly gained the upper hand; in 1927, he was able to expel Trotsky from the Party. Later Trotsky was exiled, then deported, and finally assassinated in Mexico, probably by a Stalinist agent, in 1940. All this time, Stalin never stopped denouncing Trotsky as a traitor.
Power in the Soviet Union became increasingly concentrated in Stalin\'s hands. In the 1930s, massive arrests and a series of public trials not only eliminated all possible opposition, but loyal Bolsheviks and hundreds of thousands of other absolutely innocent Russians.
Still, people all over the world who felt the pull of Marx\'s ideal--an end to exploitation and oppression, as they saw it--thought of the Soviet Union as the country of the Revolution. It was hard for many people on the Left (who think of themselves as on the side of the exploited, and want major changes in society to attain social justice) to give up this loyalty. That\'s one reason why Orwell wrote Animal Farm.
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