A civil war in Russia, which lasted from 1918 to 1921, squelched the dreams of the Bolsheviks. Russia's supplies and trade and the nation was forced into battle on multiple fronts. Industrial and agricultural productivity decreased as resources were directed to fighting the invading armies. The working class was literally decimated. Without a working class and without production, workers' control of production was impossible and the workers' state became unhinged from its social basis. Stalinism emerged as a break from the Bolshevik tradition. Stalin had to defeat the Bolshevik Party of 1917 in order to consolidate his power and the victory of the bureaucracy. Stalin's plan is summed up in the phrase he first used in the fall of 1924: "socialism in one country.

After decades in power, first in Russia and later in many other countries, it is finally obvious that Stalinism is the total opposite of a liberated society (Knabb, 1997). The origin of this phenomenon is less obvious. Many experts have tried to distinguish Stalinism from the earlier Bolshevism of Lenin and Trotsky. According to Knabb (1997): "There are differences, but they are more of degree than of kind. Lenin's the State and Revolution, for example, presents a more coherent critique of the state than can be found in most anarchist writings; the problem is that the radical aspects of Lenin's thought merely ended up camouflaging the Bolsheviks' actual authoritarian practice. Placing itself above the masses it claimed to represent, and with a corresponding internal hierarchy between party militants and their leaders, the Bolshevik Party was already well on its way toward creating the conditions for the development of Stalinism while Lenin and Trotsky were still firmly in control."

Trotsky (1937) wrote, "Is it true that Stalinism represents the legitimate product of Bolshevism, as all reactionaries maintain, as Stalin himself avows, as the Mensheviks, the anarchists, and certain left doctrinaires considering themselves...

It is by no means the same."
To those who argued that Stalin's tyranny grew naturally out of the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks' plans, the revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky rebuked that it was necessary for Stalin to liquidate the Bolshevik leadership of 1917 and systematically restructure the party to achieve his goals (Arnove, 2000): "The unimpeachable language of figures mercilessly refutes the assertion so current among the democratic intellectuals that Stalinism and Bolshevism are "one and the same." Stalinism originated not as an organic growth out of Bolshevism but as a negation of Bolshevism consummated in blood. The program of this negation is mirrored very graphically in the history of the Central Committee. Stalinism had to exterminate first politically and then physically the leading cadres of Bolshevism in order to become what it now is: an apparatus of the privileged, a brake upon historical progress, an agency of world imperialism. Stalinism and Bolshevism are mortal enemies (Trotsky, 1937).