The Soviet Union, its leaders, and its mission to build socialism have often been characterized as utopian. The word utopia means "no place, " something that does not exist in the real world but, like Thomas More's peaceful and harmonious island society, only in the imagination. The word stirs up notions of perfection and perfectability, of a possible resolution of the mundane problems of human existence, but also brings to mind an impossible ideal, a lack of realism, or an impractical scheme for social improvement. In the present "postutopian" world, utopia is most often associated with senseless dreams that can lead to social disaster, and much futuristic fiction, from George Orwell's 1984 to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, warns readers away from zealous tampering with the delicate mechanisms and achieved compromises of the societies in which they live.

But utopia can also be understood to be an ideal, a goal toward which people aspire. In this sense of utopia are contained the political hopes and ends for which people are prepared to work, die, even kill. In a sense, every political movement seeking change contains within it a utopia, a place where if all were possible people would like to end up. The early Soviet leaders traced their political heritage back to the revolutionary Left that emerged in the French Revolution. Its goals were admittedly utopian in the sense that they sought to change and reconstruct society in line with their ideals of equality, social justice, and popular participation in the political world. From the early nineteenth century, socialism, in its variety of specific meanings, has referred to the principal set of ideas and the principal social movement opposed to capitalism, the form of human organization that arose to become the dominant system of production throughout the world. From its origins, socialism had the goal of broadening the power of ordinary people, that is, of extending as far as possible the limits of democracy, not only in the realm of politics (which was the goal of democratic radicals and leftist liberals) but in the economy as well. Indeed, socialists were always convinced that the ideal of liberal democrats of a representative political order coexisting with the private ownership of the means of production and the potential accumulation of enormous wealth was fundamentally contradictory. The power implicit in property and wealth, they believed, would inevitably distort and corrupt the democratic political sphere. Therefore, socialists searched for mechanisms of social control or social ownership of the means of production.

Devoted to Karl Marx's vision of socialism, in which the working class would control the machines, factories, and other sources of wealth production, the Communists led by Lenin believed that the future social order would be based on the abolition of unearned social privilege, the end of racism and colonial oppression, the secularization of society, and the empowerment of working people. Yet within a generation Stalin and his closest comrades had created one of the most vicious and oppressive states in modern history.

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Social revolution is always a compromise between the historical material available and the visions of the revolutionaries. Russia was one of the most inhospitable places on the globe for social experimentation either socialist or capitalist. A country 85 percent peasant, the least likely candidate in Europe to create a society modeled on Marx's ideas of proletarian democracy, Russia suffered years of war, revolution, civil war, economic collapse, and famine before the Communists were securely in power. Even Lenin argued, until his death, that socialism could not be built in one country, certainly not in Russia, without an international proletarian revolution to come to the aid of more backward nations. But that revolution never came, and the Soviet Union was left isolated and backward at the edge of Europe. If the country was to become modern, it would have to do it on its own.

Marxism's intellectual roots ran deep in the industrial revolution, and along with its aspirations to end exploitation and fully realize human potential, it also shared certain logics with capitalism and the whole Western project to achieve a particular kind of industrial modernization. The Communist Party committed itself to the enormous task of transforming the people from peasants to workers and the country from basically agrarian to industrial. But as it used the instruments of its power to force change on a reluctant people, the party moved rapidly away from any conceivably democratic concept of popular participation. In many ways, the story of the twentieth century can be told as the erosion of the emancipatory, moral, humanistic side of Marxism, indeed socialism in general, and the elevation of the economistic, productivist, statist elements -- to the point that its utopia became, in the USSR, the dystopia of Stalinism, and in the West the compromise with capitalism embodied in Western Social Democracy.

Social revolutions are a compromise between utopia and historical reality. The tool of revolution is utopia, and the material is the social reality on which one wants to impose a new form

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I use the word "utopia" deliberately and not the in derogatory sense that expresses the absurd notion that all social changes are pipe dreams. By utopia I mean a state of social consciousness, a mental counterpart to the social movement striving for radical change in the world—a counterpart itself inadequate to these changes and merely reflecting them in an idealized and obscure form. It endows the real movement with the sense of realizing an ideal born in the realm of pure spirit and not in the current historical experience.

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Yet why is utopia a condition of all revolutionary movements? Because much historical experience, more or less buried in the social consciousness, tells us that goals unattainable now will never be reached unless they are articulated when they are still unattainable. It may well be that the impossible at a given moment can become possible only by being stated at a time when it is impossible.. The existence of a utopia as a utopia is the necessary prerequisite for its eventually ceasing to be a utopia