Indeed, although born of the most popular revolution in history, the new regime in the former Russian empire became unaccountable to the people, and even to itself. A mass participatory revolutionary process not only can, but frequently does, culminate in a narrow regime, and not because the revolution has “degenerated,” or because good intentions and a good beginning are ruined by malefactors or unlucky circumstances, but because the international situation impinges at every turn, institutions are formed out of the shards of the old as well as the maw of the new, and ideas matter.
