Lenin wrote The State and Revolution in August and September 1917, in hiding across the Finnish border, a fugitive from the Provisional Government he would overthrow within weeks. He worked from a small blue notebook headed "Marxism on the State" — quotations from Marx and Engels he had gathered the previous year while arguing with Bukharin about whether a socialist revolution should seize the existing state or destroy it. The book was published in 1918 and never finished. Its planned seventh chapter, on the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, was cut short by the October insurrection itself. In a one-page postscript Lenin explained the gap with a sentence that has outlived most of the book's arguments: "It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of revolution' than to write about it."
That unwritten chapter is where this introduction begins, because the experience Lenin went off to have would answer his book in a way he did not intend. No political pamphlet of the twentieth century was printed more often or read more dutifully. Progress Publishers and its predecessor issued it in scores of languages; it sat on every Soviet syllabus. And no book in this library stands in a stranger relation to the state that published it, because The State and Revolution is the most sustained attack on bureaucratic state power in the entire Marxist canon — and it was canonised by the most bureaucratic state the workers' movement ever produced.
Its power is that of recovery. Lenin set out to rescue the theory of the state that Marx and Engels had built and that the leaders of pre-war Social Democracy — above all Karl Kautsky — had, in his word, "forgotten." Against them he insists on a hard definition: "The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms." It is not a neutral referee standing above society but an instrument of class rule — at bottom, he says, following Engels, "special bodies of armed men, prisons, etc." From this everything follows. If the state is an organ of one class's domination, the working class cannot simply lay hands on the ready-made machine and use it for its own purposes. It must, in Marx's word from The Eighteenth Brumaire, "smash" it — break up the standing army, the police and the bureaucracy — and replace it with something of a wholly different type.
That something is the Paris Commune of 1871, which supplies the book's positive model. Lenin reads the Commune as the discovered form of workers' power: officials elected and subject to recall at any moment, paid no more than a worker's wage; the standing army replaced by the armed people; the separation of powers abolished so that the same body makes and executes the laws — "a working, not a parliamentary, body." Representative institutions are not abandoned but transformed; what is thrown out is parliamentarism, the arrangement by which citizens get "to decide once every few years which members of the ruling class [are] to repress and crush the people." Beyond this lies the "withering away" — a term Lenin takes from Engels and defends against its opportunist softening. The state does not wither under socialism because the state is nice; it withers because, once class antagonisms are gone, the "special bodies of armed men" have nothing left to do. Until then the workers need a state of their own — but already a "semi-state," a state so shorn of officialdom and standing force that it has begun to dissolve on the day it is born.
Read as theory, this is bracing and, on its own terms, coherent. It remains the sharpest short statement of why socialists cannot be content to administer the existing machinery of government.
A fair reading has to mark the silences, because they are where the trouble entered. The State and Revolution is a book about the state that says almost nothing about the party. The instrument that would actually hold power in Russia after October — a centralised vanguard organisation — is barely present; the Commune model quietly assumes that the armed workers themselves, not a party apparatus acting in their name, will run things. Nor does the book reckon with backwardness. Its Commune is imagined in an advanced country with a working-class majority and a short road to abundance; it has little to say about what becomes of a "semi-state" that must survive civil war, famine and isolation in a peasant country where the proletariat is a thin and shrinking minority. The withering away is offered as a tendency with almost no counter-tendency named. The possibility that the "semi-state" might not dissolve but harden — that a new officialdom might congeal precisely out of the emergency measures of a besieged revolution — is the one danger the book does not think through. This is not hindsight smuggled in: it is the gap the next four years would fill.
Here the Progress edition earns its introduction. A book becomes doctrine not only through what it says but through how it is placed, and the Soviet apparatus placed this one with care. Fixed as Volume 25 of the Collected Works, wrapped in the Institute of Marxism-Leninism's annotations, taught as catechism, The State and Revolution was honoured in exactly the measure that it was disregarded. The Soviet edition's own editorial apparatus — the introductions and notes through which the state framed the book to itself — is itself part of how the canonisation worked, and repays reading for the framing it performs.
The misuse is not subtle, which is why it was never discussed. The state that published The State and Revolution built, point for point, the machine the book condemns. Lenin demanded the abolition of the standing army; the USSR raised one of the largest in history. He demanded officials elected, recallable and paid a worker's wage; the Soviet state produced a bureaucracy neither elected nor recallable, and a caste whose privileges Lenin's Commune-standard was designed to make impossible. He called the periodic ballot that changes nothing "the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism"; the state that printed the sentence let its people decide nothing at all. The "semi-state" that was supposed to begin withering on day one instead swelled for seventy years. It is the exact reversal Trotsky drew out in The Revolution Betrayed, a book that is in large part The State and Revolution held up as a ruler against the thing the revolution became — and the gap measured in the space between them.
And the machine was betrayed from the other flank as well. Where the Soviet state swelled the apparatus Lenin said must be broken, the great Western Communist parties, by the 1970s, decided it need not be broken at all. Eurocommunism — the "democratic road to socialism" of the Italian, French and Spanish parties — made its peace with the standing army, the bureaucracy and the parliamentary state, and proposed to pass through them to socialism rather than smash them. Santiago Carrillo even gave the position its book, Eurocommunism and the State, whose title reads as a deliberate inversion of Lenin's; Ernest Mandel answered it for the Fourth International in From Stalinism to Eurocommunism, tracing the capitulation to the same root as the Eastern one — the retreat into "socialism in one country" and the abandonment of world revolution. So the pamphlet was refuted from both sides at once: in the East by a state that would not wither, in the West by parties that would no longer smash.
This is why, of all the volumes in this series, The State and Revolution fails the test we apply to each of them most completely and most instructively. Every book here is asked whether its own central category can be turned on the state that issued it. Most cannot make the turn. This one makes it unavoidably: its category is the critique of bureaucratic state power, and there is no reading of it that does not indict the publisher. That is precisely why it could be printed in millions and remain politically inert — revered in ritual, dead in practice, a charter recited by the regime it convicts.
Honesty requires one more turn of the screw. Lenin is not a bystander to the outcome. The hardening of the Soviet state into the apparatus his book condemned began under his own leadership, in the demobilising of the working class and the swelling of officialdom that followed the civil war. The State and Revolution is not innocent of what came after; it is silent about the machinery that would betray it. But it is by this book, more than any other, that the betrayal can be named — which is the difference between a text that excuses a regime and one that arraigns it. Lenin set the pamphlet aside to make the revolution. The revolution wrote his missing seventh chapter, and it was not the one he had planned. Read here not as the Soviet state's founding charter but as its indictment, drafted in advance by the state's own founder.