Here is the paragraph before it:
The trauma of these years broke the Russian working class. By 1921, Lenin would go so far as to argue that the working class, “owing to the war and to the desperate poverty and ruin, has become declassed, i.e., dislodged from its class groove, and has ceased to exist as a proletariat.” The withering away of the state had reversed. In place of local working-class militias organizing themselves, the Bolsheviks were forced to professionalize the Red Army. In place of vibrant democracy and frequent elections, famine and unemployment discouraged political participation. In place of a multiparty state with competing parties, the other political parties turned on the Bolsheviks and were in turn banned under the exigencies of civil war. The material conditions for a healthy workers’ state were destroyed. Antidemocratic measures initially justified as wartime necessities mutated into virtues as the revolutionaries grimly hung on for dear life.
This kind of takes pretends as though the USSR existed in a vacuum.
The revolutions that the Bolsheviks had attempted to inspire across Europe had failed. The Spartacus uprising in Germany ended with the KPD leaders brutally murdered by Freikorps hired by the social democrats.
A new form of violent counterrevolution specifically designed to defeat Leninism, known as fascism, had succeeded in Italy, and was gaining momentum throughout Europe especially in Germany.
Yes, please tell me the USSR - that just came out of a bloody civil war - could somehow magically defeat these reactionary forces that were fully intended to smash the world’s first socialist state without taking precautionary and the necessary steps, however brutal that might be. It’s pure, undistilled idealism.