Lincoln Steffens

Lincoln Steffens was an American muckraking journalist whose visit to revolutionary Russia became one of the book’s emblematic encounters with the promise of Soviet power. Sent to Moscow on a mission to understand the Bolsheviks and explore peace, he returned convinced that the regime embodied the future; the subsequent account of Soviet industrialization makes his declaration resonate both as a contemporary expression of hope and as a measure of how much that hope left out.

Identity and Background

Steffens had made his name as an iconoclastic journalist who persistently denounced the evils of capitalism in the United States. That reputation mattered to the diplomatic mission: his presence was intended to make it appear credible to the Bolsheviks and not excessively hostile. He was therefore more than an observer accompanying negotiations. His public criticism of American capitalism gave him a particular standing for a mission seeking to understand a government that claimed to be building a different economic order.

He had already been in Russia at the time of the revolution. When the First World War ended, however, Russia was absent from the gathering of victorious and defeated powers at Versailles, outside Paris. The tsarist regime had been overthrown by the Bolsheviks in October 1917, and a civil war between the Reds and Whites was raging. Against that unsettled background, the English, French, and Americans sent an expeditionary force to fight the Bolsheviks while also dispatching a diplomatic mission to Moscow to assess their intentions and the possibility of terms for peace.

The Mission to Moscow

The mission was led by the young diplomat William Bullitt and included Steffens and the veteran intellectual and journalist Lincoln Steffens. Its task was to meet with Lenin and learn what the Bolsheviks intended, as well as what it might take to reach peace with the newly created Soviet Union. The mission returned with the outlines of an offer from Lenin. Its work belonged to a moment when the powers were confronting the new regime as both a military opponent and a political reality with which they might have to negotiate.

Steffens’s prior presence in Russia and his reputation as a critic of capitalism lent the visit a special credibility. Yet his response went beyond the mission’s practical purpose. He was bowled over by what he saw as the Soviet regime’s potential. The shift is central to his role in the account: the envoy who had gone to investigate the Bolsheviks returned not merely with information about their peace offer, but with a powerful endorsement of their larger political and economic project.

A Revolutionary Government with a Plan

In his 1931 autobiography, Steffens recalled Soviet Russia as a “revolutionary government with an evolutionary plan.” He described its declared method not as directly attacking poverty, wealth, graft, privilege, tyranny, and war one by one, but as seeking out and removing their causes. In his account, the regime had established a dictatorship backed by a small, trained minority, tasked with reorganizing economic forces over several generations. Economic democracy was to come first, political democracy last.

That formulation exposes the wager beneath his admiration. The dictatorship was not presented as an end in itself, but as an instrument for a planned transformation whose promised democratic destination lay in the future. Steffens’s recollection gives the Soviet project an orderly sequence—concentrated power, scientific economic rearrangement, economic democracy, then political democracy. Its confidence depends on accepting that a narrow ruling group could use coercive authority for long enough to produce a more democratic society later.

The Phrase That Outlived the Visit

After returning from his diplomatic mission, Steffens went to see his old friend, the sculptor Jo Davidson, who was making a portrait bust of the wealthy financier Bernard Baruch. Baruch remarked that Steffens had been over in Russia. Steffens answered, “I have been over into the future, and it works.” He later perfected the saying into the form that became famous: “I’ve seen the future, and it works.”

The scene compresses the force of his conversion into a contrast: a visitor to the Soviet Union sits among an American sculptor and financier, then describes Russia not simply as a different country but as the future itself. The phrase made Steffens’s verdict portable and memorable. It turned an impression formed on a diplomatic journey into a broad claim about the direction of history and the practical promise of the Soviet system.

The Promise and Its Limits

The book places Steffens’s optimism beside the later record of Soviet growth. Westerners continued to see the Soviet Union as a working future through the early 1980s, and for a time the state did achieve rapid industrial growth. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin consolidated power by 1927, purged opponents, and launched rapid industrialization through the State Planning Committee, Gosplan. Its first Five-Year Plan ran from 1928 to 1933. The growth strategy relied on government direction of industry and the extraction of resources from agriculture.

That strategy also reveals what Steffens’s declaration did not encompass. The state abolished private property rights to land and forced people in the countryside into large collective farms, making agricultural output easier to seize and use to feed factory workers. Production fell sharply as the farms lacked incentives for hard work; the extraction left too little to eat. Probably six million people died in the resulting famine, while hundreds of thousands more were murdered or banished to Siberia during forcible collectivization. The later Soviet story thus places the promise of economic reordering beside the violence and deprivation used to pursue it.

The contrast is not simply between a successful beginning and a failed end. Soviet industry and collectivized agriculture were economically inefficient, yet the country grew rapidly for a time because labor and capital could be shifted by command into a sector, such as heavy industry, with much higher productivity. In the book’s account, extractive institutions can generate growth by mobilizing resources and enforcing order, but growth based on existing technologies differs from sustained growth driven by technological change. Steffens’s “future” captured the appeal of a state able to direct a dramatic transformation; the later evidence limits that claim by showing both the human cost of the method and why its growth could not, on its own, guarantee lasting prosperity.