[...] the Bolesheviks were to march their starving, despondent, war-wearing people into modernity at the point of a gun. Many of the most politically militant workers had perished in the Western-backed civil war, leaving the Bolshevik party with a dwindling social base. [...] Russia's economy lay in ruins, and its social fabric had disintegrated. In a tragic irony that was to mark the twentieth century as a whole, socialism proved least possible where it was most necessary.