Following the Bolshevik seizure of power in late 1917, Vladimir Lenin and his fellow Soviet leaders sought to form a new type of government. They insisted that the Soviet state not follow the model of parliamentary systems, and instead sought new forms of administration they believed would be responsive to the laboring masses. In her book Inside Lenin's Government, Lara Douds examines the functioning of the Soviet state in the first years of its existence. She finds that Lenin's efforts to establish proletarian democracy were genuine, and that “the monolithic, authoritarian party-state was not the immediate nor conscious outcome of Bolshevik ideology” (4). At the same time, she chronicles the inadequacies of Lenin's government—Sovnarkom (the Council of People's Commissars)—and describes the slide during the Civil War toward Politburo rule and a Communist Party dictatorship.

Lenin had no blueprint from which to build the world's first socialist state. In 1917, prior to the Bolshevik takeover, he had grappled with questions of governmental structure in his book State and Revolution. Douds analyzes this work and notes that Lenin repudiated the separation of powers and what he called bourgeois parliamentarianism. He argued instead for a type of socialist commune democracy, with no division between legislative, executive, or judicial authority. While Lenin claimed that such a system would make officials more accountable to the people, Douds points out that he essentially conflated politics and administration. Such an approach proved impractical, and moreover it left no space for political opposition within the system.

Douds goes on to explore how the nascent Soviet state functioned once it formed after the October Revolution. Soviet leaders initially experimented with collegial bodies instead of individual ministers to oversee policy-making and administration. While purportedly more democratic, this arrangement did not result in strong governmental departments capable of dealing with the country's urgent problems. Lenin also called for the appointment of workers to official posts in order to guarantee the proletarian character of the Soviet government. This approach too largely failed due to a dearth of literate workers with administrative experience. Finally, Lenin placed great emphasis on the Sovnarkom Reception as a direct link between the government and the laboring masses. The reception was an office at government headquarters where petitioners could address their questions and complaints directly to high government officials. Lenin himself spent much of his day receiving delegations of peasants, workers, and soldiers who traveled from around the country to meet with the “head Bolshevik.”

Sovnarkom functioned as the highest decision-making body during the Soviet regime's first year and a half in power, but it proved unequal to the administrative exigencies of the Civil War. From mid-1919, the Communist Party's Politburo began to take over as the country's ruling body. The commissars who made up Sovnarkom increasingly became simply officials appointed by the Politburo, and they no longer answered to the soviets but rather to the Communist Party. Douds concludes that the “naïve methods of ‘anti-bureaucratic’ Soviet democracy failed under the pressures of Civil War and social-economic dislocation” (174).

Historians will find much to admire in Douds's judicious study. Like T. H. Rigby, author of Lenin's Government: Sovnarkom 1917–1922 (1979), she recognizes the early Soviet state as a genuine attempt at democratic socialist governance and argues that the October Revolution did not immediately result in a Communist Party dictatorship. Whereas Rigby's pioneering study was done prior to the opening of Soviet archives, Douds had access to a wealth of archival materials, including the minutes of Sovnarkom meetings, personnel records, memoranda, and other departmental papers. She is able to reconstruct in illuminating detail how the administrative apparatus of the world's first socialist state formed, how it functioned, and how it ultimately fell under the domination of a one-party dictatorship.