There are twin myths about Stalin's Russia: that this monstrous dictatorship was socialist, and that Stalin was the inevitable outcome of the revolution because it was led by Lenin's revolutionary Bolsheviks.

These myths were peddled in both the East and the West during the Cold War. What better way to convince Western workers that socialism wasn't worth fighting for, and for Stalin to justify his rule?

But Stalin's one-party state with its gulags had nothing to do with socialism. Stalin carried out a full-blown counter-revolution that abolished all the gains won by workers and peasants in the revolution of 1917.

Rather than proving that socialism has been tried and failed, the 1917 revolution shows that socialism is possible. It was the first time in history that workers had taken state power. Having overthrown the hated Tsarist regime in February, and then the capitalist Provisional Government in October, the working-class initiated incredible reforms.

Workers' control was instituted in factories. Land was given to the peasantry. Free nurseries, communal kitchens and laundries were set up. Divorce was available on demand. Homosexuality was taken out of the criminal code. Mass literacy campaigns were initiated and the right of self-determination was given to all Russia's oppressed nations.

The workers' state of "backward" Russia put the capitalist states in "civilised" Western Europe to shame and inspired millions the world over to try to repeat what Russian workers and peasants had done.

But to go on and build socialism, the revolution had to spread to more advanced capitalist countries. Socialism requires an abundance of resources. These were lacking in Russia, but economic conditions were ripe for socialism on a world scale.

Lenin argued that "we always staked our play on an international revolution." There were revolutions in Austria, Hungary and Germany in the wake of the Russian Revolution, and upsurges elsewhere. Ultimately these revolutions were unsuccessful and the German revolution's defeat sealed Russia's fate.

The Bolsheviks had always expected that if the revolution were smashed it would be by foreign armies and domestic reaction. Indeed, 14 imperialist countries invaded Russia. Yet the Red Army won the Civil War against all odds. In the process, however, the working class was decimated, many of its best fighters died, and counter-revolution came from within.

A new bureaucratic class led by Stalin arose. By 1929 his grip on power was tight, and he reversed all of the revolution's gains. Workers and peasants were again exploited, this time, disgustingly, in the name of socialism.

The first five-year plan in 1928 set the seal on the revolution's defeat. Without a revolution in at least one Western country, Russia was drawn back into the competition of the world capitalist economy. Stalin declared, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years or we shall go under." Workers and peasants were to be super-exploited to meet this goal.

Lenin had rightly argued that "in one country it is impossible to achieve such a work as a socialist revolution." But under Stalin, internationalism and world revolution were replaced by their opposites - nationalism and imperialism - in the name of "socialism in one country". The distorted language of Marxism was used by a new ruling class to oppress the majority and the workers' state had become state capitalist.

Stalin's Russia was in no way a continuation of the revolutionary tradition. His obliteration of all traces of the revolution extended to physically liquidating the "old Bolsheviks". Stalin was responsible for the murder of 70 per cent of the members and candidates of the Central Committee, 80 per cent of whom had joined the party before 1921. Trotsky, who fought Stalin tooth and nail both inside the USSR and in exile after 1929, was eventually murdered in 1940.

Like all class societies, this new one and the satellites it set up after World War II (with the connivance of the West) bred resistance. There were workers' revolts in Eastern Europe in 1953, 1956, 1968 and 1980. And from 1989 to 1991 popular revolutions brought the whole monolith tumbling down.

In Hungary in 1956, for example, workers' councils like those of 1917 sprang up. If Russia was a workers' state, why would workers need to rise up against it in country after country, only to be put down by "socialist" tanks?

Clearly Russia wasn't socialist. But the Russian Revolution did put socialism on the agenda, and in its wake, world capitalism hung in the balance. The brief period of workers' rule showed that ordinary people can run the world and that exploitation, poverty and oppression are neither natural or necessary. This is why we should both draw inspiration from 1917 and be clear on the nature of the counter-revolution and Stalin's Russia.

In the words of the Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg: "In Russia, the problem [of building socialism] could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to Bolshevism."