The basic premise of The Age of Catastrophe is that ‘the Bolshevik reign of terror was more than just a reaction to the extremely difficult situation in early 1918 both inside Russia and beyond, for it necessarily resulted from Lenin’s plan to create a new communist society within a backward country’. The distortion here is the phrase ‘Lenin’s plan’. Unlike Fascism, Leninism never produced a general political theory to justify one-party rule; party autocracy was always understood as an undesirable but unavoidable historical necessity in the particular conditions of Russia. As Winkler’s analysis shows, neither Lenin nor Trotsky thought it was possible to create a communist society in Russia alone. When Trotsky’s call for world revolution at Brest-Litovsk was answered with mass demonstrations and strikes, the SPD leadership in Germany exerted every effort to undermine the movement, hardening the very isolation that Winkler himself acknowledges was one of the main reasons for the dictatorial methods of the Bolsheviks. The notion of a direct route to socialism and communism in such confinement was Stalin’s, not Lenin’s. Anyone with an iota of historical curiosity must pose a question that The Age of Catastrophe avoids: what might have been the consequences of a forthright defence—by Kautsky, for example—of the Bolshevik revolution and a call for solidary insurrection in the West in 1918, for both the course of Russian political development and the prospects for socialism in western Europe?