The fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution has challenged thinking people everywhere to reasses the Soviet Russian achievement. In meeting this challenge, Mr Nettl (author of a well-known biography of Rosa Luxemburg) has written a profund historical interpretation of the aims, triumphs and failures of Lenin and his successors, with emphasis on the extraordinary changes wich these have brought about in the lives of the Soviet people. This is a study of the deliberate creation of a new industrial society from a relatively backward, underdeveloped and basically rural country. Mr Nettl illustrates the shifting balance between theory and practice, the attempt to apply Marxist ideology to practical problems, and the evolution of those distinctively Soviet solutions which have made the USSR one of the two dominating world powers.