SOURCE: "Rereading Lenin's State and Revolution," in Slavic Review, Vol. 46, No. 1, Spring, 1987, pp. 1-19.

In the following essay, Evans argues that Lenin's State and Revolution is not antithetical to the rest of Lenin's work, as most critics contend, but rather that the "tension between the polarities of value in Lenin's thought" would later become an integral part of Soviet politics.

State and Revolution has long seemed to be the most puzzling of Lenin's written works. The traditional view among western scholars has regarded State and Revolution as a Utopian fantasy that is completely out of character with the rest of Lenin's thought. The most prominent exponent of that viewpoint is Robert V. Daniels, who, in an influential article published in 1953, asserted that the ideas of State and Revolution were "permeated with an idealistic, almost Utopian spirit." and who in a later work described State and Revolution as an...