not count on the in-between situation that actually took place: a level of European revolution and of war exhaustion sufficient to blunt the imperialist world’s intervention without bringing about a social revolution on the Continent, so that the Russian Revolution survived militarily—but was isolated. The Beleaguered Fortress had been waiting for the revolutionary war to be won, so that it would be relieved. Now the war was over; and the fortress was still beleaguered.

All Russian Marxists had for decades explained that in their country a purely proletarian government, a socialist government, would be unviable, short of world revolution. That meant: a counterrevolutionary overthrow was inevitable. It would seem, therefore, unnecessary to explain why the universally expected actually happened—except for one detail. The counterrevolution came from inside the rulingproduces temporary distortions: if you hang a series of weights on a steel wire, the wire will stretch—and stretch again—until the weights arc removed, after which the wire snaps back to its original size, In physics. it is said that the strain on the wire did not exceed the steel’s elastic limit. In politics, it is said that the deformation was not outside the bounds of principle, In one of the alternate-time universes well known to science-fiction readers, perhaps the German Revolution of 1918-1920 burst through the bonds imposed by the Social-Democrats, and Soviet Germany came into existence, with its economic efficiency, educated and advanced proletariat, technical knowledge and wealth. Germany plus Russia equals Communist Europe, Lenin said. Soviet Russia became a rather dreary backwater of the new