The Russian Revolution was not the first workers’ revolution. In 1871 the Communards set up the Paris Commune. It lasted for just two months before the French army massacred them. Between 10,000 to 20,000 were killed with many more put in prison & thousands deported. Lenin’s book State & Revolution, written a year before the October Revolution, has the experience of the Commune at its heart. He repeats Marx’s assertion that the Commune is the form of working-class democracy, not bourgeois parliament. It was to be the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ that waged on-going class struggle after the revolution to create the classless society of communism.
