For example, in the early days of the Russian Revolution there was a very high standard of democracy which those fighting the revolution created.

In the early days soviet democracy prevailed, land and factories were turned over to peasant and worker soviets, the debt was canceled, the banks, trusts and cartels were nationalized... [it was] democratic to the core, in which the police and standing army were to be replaced by the armed people." (weissman) This was changed not by an internal failure, but because European and American forces both sent armies and provided military and monetary support to counterrevolutionaries within Russia.

The Civil War, brought on by the world bourgeoisie... [with] fourteen invading armies and the White 'contras' of the day... brought the end to soviet democracy.... [partly because] the advanced revolutionary workers had been killed in the Civil War; Bolshevism now governed a mass of war-weary, semiliterate peasants...
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