On several occasions Lenin wrote or spoke about a phenomenon that he called ‘state capitalism’. He took a favourable view of this phenomenon, regarding it as progressive. State capitalism, he argued, was not socialism but it was (or would be) a step forward toward socialism, especially for backward Russia.

Lenin first expressed this view in September 1917, the month before the Bolsheviks seized power, in a pamphlet entitled The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It. He reiterated it in March 1918 in an article on the ‘Brest Peace’ with Germany. He asserted the same view repeatedly during the last three years of his life (1921–24) –for example, in January 1923 in an article for a Russian émigrénewspaper (‘To the Russian Colony in North America’).