June 13, 2009:
The Bolsheviks failed to smash the state. Instead, they fused with it.
This is the meaning of the "commissar" system. The Tsarist state apparatus remained intact. But it had armed representatives of the Soviet added to it. The purpose of the commissars was to point guns at the heads of the "professionals". This is the system which led to Red victory in the civil war: Tsarist officers with guns to their heads.
How many officers? There's a story that Lenin was shocked when Trotsky told him. Tens of thousands.
Not just the army. The entire governing apparatus remained in place, unsmashed. The Stalinist bureaucracy was the marriage of the former Tsarist state apparatus with the commissars.
"What went wrong in Russia?" The sectarian left has never addressed this question. Instead it's responded with the standard incantations: Leninist Norms, the Tenth Congress, the failure of the German revolution. All of these were real, none of them is the answer.
The Reds were able to retain state power. They were unable to smash the state. This was the outcome of the revolution.
What implication does this have for the prospect of the withering away of the state?