It is a commonplace wisdom that from the authoritarian roots of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 grew the gulags and the police state of the Stalinist epoch. The Dictator, the Revolution, The Machine overturns that perspective once and for all by showing how October was inspired by a profound mass movement comprised of urban workers and rural poor – a movement that went on to forge a state capable of channelling its political will in and through the most overwhelming form of grass-roots democracy history has ever known.