Did Russia Fit Brinton's Model?

Brinton included Russia among his four cases, and in some ways it fits: an old regime in financial and military crisis, a moderate Provisional Government, the seizure of power by radicals, and a period of terror. But where was Russia's Thermidor? Some point to the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921, when Lenin restored limited private trade after the Kronstadt rebellion, as a retreat from radicalism.

Leon Trotsky, exiled by Stalin, argued in The Revolution Betrayed (1936) that Stalin's bureaucracy was a 'Soviet Thermidor'. Yet Stalin then launched forced collectivization and the purges of the 1930s, a second radical wave greater than anything before. Russia thus strains Brinton's model: the cycle did not end in calm but in a new, more intense revolution from above. This suggests that the model's stages describe a tendency, not a fixed sequence.