October Revolution Didn't Have Intended Effect

It should be obvious by now that the regime that came to be known as Stalinism wasn't born overnight, but emerged in a succession of fatal steps over the greater part of the early 1920s. If this was not sufficiently clear already from E.H. Carr's magisterial, multi-volume History of Soviet Russia, it is now abundantly evident in the most recent accounts to appear, based on the wealth of new documentation that has been thrown open in the post-Soviet state and party archives, in work like Barbara Allen's fascinating biography of Alexander Shlyapnikov and Simon Pirani's methodical analysis of the revolution's “retreat” which deals with the period from 1920 to 1924. To this new, post-Soviet scholarship one can now add the expanded translation of Victor Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary published in 2012, restoring nearly 200 cuts that Serge's translator Peter Sedgwick had been forced to make to the original translation.