In March 1917, as the people of Russia demonstrated against the hunger and privations brought by World War I, the tsar of the Russian Empire gave up his throne. A provisional government took power in St. Petersburg, the imperial capital. Seven months later, the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Socialist Party led the overthrow of the provisional government. Under Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, known to history by his revolutionary name of Lenin, the Bolsheviks transformed Russia into a socialist state, modeled on the ideas of the nineteenth-century writers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Like Marx and Engels, Lenin saw history as a logical, scientific process. The aim of the Bolshevik government would be to bring this process to its natural conclusion: a socialist state of perfect equality and justice. At this final point in the process, communism would be attained; government itself...