You didn't exactly answer the question, communard. Were the councils ever in power in Russia?
for a short time, in some place, before the Party made empty boxes of them....or smashed them, like Kronstadt.
Russia was an undeveloped country, with few proletarians.
In these conditions, without a revolution in europe, the russian revolution couldn't be anything but a bourgeois one.
Lenin knew that, and decided to be the leader of this bourgeois revolution.... at this time, it started the worst counter revolution ever.
I think that without stalinism, the natural consequence of bolshevik theory and practice against workers (in the name of socialism, of course), today, 2008, this forum would not exist, because capitalism would not be anymore.
Nowadays, probably 99,9% of proletarians think that "communism" is a fascist regime, a super police state lead by the Party. So they are anti-communists. Can you blame them? they've been screwed up by "communists parties" for 100 years.
It's an hard work tell them that Marx is not the theoretician of the State power against workers.... thanks comrade Lenin! you did a great job!
The russian revolution couldn't be a communist one.... it's not a Lenin fault, in few words it's a matter of means of production...and of isolation, of course.
But the bolsheviks fault is another....and it's huge. Stalinism was not a necessary material consequence....normally, other countries did their fucking bourgeois revolution without a "communist" ideology that destroy every movement toward communism worldwide, throwing tons of shit over Marx's thought.
You bolsheviks left communists are the best product of that, you are also victims of stalinism.....and its absurd that you still preach for "what is to be done?" with his second international crap, the theoretical roots of stalinism.
i hope you got what i mean, my english is poor.
I'd say because it was weaker, so much that it couldn't manage to spread even to the suburbs of Paris, let alone the whole France, and of course there wasn't an international revolutionary wave to support to commune in any way.
Had the revolution in Russia been more isolated, it would not have been defeated by an "internal" counter-revolution but by the White counter-revolution.