Moscow (Soviet capital) became a point of contact between the new Soviet government and Western observers after the Russian Revolution. In the account of a mission sent to meet Lenin, the city is where diplomatic efforts to understand the Bolsheviks’ intentions met Lincoln Steffens’s conviction that their political and economic experiment represented a future that worked.

A city at the center of postwar diplomacy

After the First World War, the victorious powers met at Versailles, while Russia was absent from the peace settlement. The tsarist regime had fallen to the Bolsheviks in October 1917, and civil war between the Reds and Whites continued. Britain, France, and the United States had sent an expeditionary force against the Bolsheviks; in this tense setting, a mission led by the young diplomat William Bullitt and the veteran journalist Steffens traveled to Moscow to meet Lenin and explore the Bolsheviks’ intentions and the possibility of reaching an accommodation.

Steffens’s presence was intended to lend the mission credibility and make it appear less hostile. His reputation as a muckraker who had denounced the evils of capitalism in the United States gave him a distinctive position: he was not simply an official observer, but a critic of the system the Bolsheviks claimed to replace. Having also been in Russia during the revolution, he returned from Moscow impressed by the new regime’s apparent capacity for transformation.

The encounter and the promise of a planned future

The mission returned with the outlines of an offer from Lenin concerning the terms of peace with the newly created Soviet Union. Steffens, however, brought back more than a diplomatic proposal. He saw the Soviet regime as an attempt to remove the causes of poverty, privilege, and political oppression through a dictatorship that would reorganize economic life before eventually allowing political democracy. His interpretation gave the encounter in Moscow a significance beyond the immediate question of peace: the city had become, for him, evidence that a radically different social order might be made to function.

On returning, Steffens visited his friend, the sculptor Jo Davidson, who was making a portrait bust of the financier Bernard Baruch. Baruch asked about Steffens’s trip to Russia, and Steffens replied, “I have been over into the future, and it works.” He later perfected the phrase into “I’ve seen the future, and it works.” The anecdote ties Moscow’s political significance to the phrase through which Steffens’s enthusiasm would become known.

Moscow as an emblem of Soviet possibility—and its limits

Steffens’s judgment helped sustain Western belief in the Soviet experiment. The book notes that many Westerners continued to see the Soviet Union as the future well into the early 1980s. In one sense, their confidence had a basis: under Joseph Stalin, the state drove rapid industrialization through central planning and the extraction of agricultural resources. Yet the same account emphasizes the catastrophic human costs of forced collectivization and the system’s inability to create the incentives required for sustained innovation.

Moscow therefore carries two connected meanings in the narrative. It is the destination of a mission that sought to understand and negotiate with the Bolsheviks, and the place from which Steffens returned convinced that Soviet rule offered a functioning alternative to capitalism. In retrospect, that conviction stands against the later evidence of coercion, economic limits, and political fragility. The city’s role is not to prove that the promised future worked indefinitely, but to mark the moment when a powerful observer believed he had seen it at work.