Mikhail Tomskii was the kind of Bolshevik that Vladimir Lenin had long sought: a genuine worker, a proletarian intelligent who could speak as a Social Democrat to his fellow workers and bring the message of socialism and revolution into their ranks. He grew up in the squalid factory town of Kolpino outside of St. Petersburg, where, in an ironic turn of fate, a few months after the October Revolution of 1917 Bolsheviks would shoot workers protesting their monopoly of power. He was an early adherent to the Leninist wing of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party and suffered imprisonment and exile as did his comrades, only to be liberated by the revolution of February 1917. Moderate in demeanor and policy in comparison to his fellow Bolsheviks, Tomskii was nevertheless Bolshevik in temperament. When he achieved power as the head of Soviet trade unions during the Civil War (1918–21), he defended the close relationship of unions with the state and opposed the right of workers to strike against the state that proclaimed itself their representative. The Bolsheviks had no blueprint for how workers and unions would actually influence, govern, or be dominated by the burgeoning bureaucracy. But in the context of fierce internal warfare among contenders for power and foreign intervention to overthrown Soviet power, step by grudging step the trade unions became an instrument of the state instead of the other way round.

Wynn provides one of the clearest and convincing accounts of the divisive and decisive trade union debate of the 1920s. Early in 1919, the Bolsheviks supported the management of the economy by the trade unions, encouraging workers to participate in the running of enterprises. But by the end of the year, with the economy disintegrating and labor productivity collapsing, Tomskii's principal foe, Lev Trotskii, proposed the militarization of labor, that is, the formation of labor armies and the introduction of military discipline in the work force. Lenin insisted on one-man management of enterprises to replace the collegial leadership in which trade unions kept an eye on so-called “bourgeois specialists,” employed because of their technical skills. Tomskii rejected both Trotskii and Lenin's positions, as well as the radical views of the Workers’ Opposition, which proposed that the trade unions directly take over the running of the economy. The so-called “trade-union debate” continued well into 1920 and determined the future form of Soviet state relations with its major constituency, the working class. Tomskii ultimately compromised with the top party leaders and was supported by Lenin. Both full statization of the trade unions and full trade union management of the economy were rejected in favor of limited trade union participation in the economy. Over time, one-man management and a larger role of the state effectively marginalized the influence of the trade unions and, by extension, the independent power of workers. Henceforth, the trade unions, though independent of the state, were subordinate to the Communist Party.

Although Lenin did not win all the conflicts within his party, his imprimatur weighed heavy in the disputes of the Communist leadership. When Tomskii was sent to Central Asia to resolve the disputes arising between Russian settlers and the indigenous Muslims, he was caught between Lenin's contradictory goals of backing the claims of the local Muslims, whom he hoped were the harbingers of an anti-colonial revolution in Asia, and the local Russians, who were the most fervent supporters of Soviet power. Somehow the affable Tomskii usually found a way to stay in the good graces of his superiors in the party, even when he vehemently challenged them. He rose quickly in the mid-1920s to the highest rank of the party, the Politburo, and thrived in the years of the New Economic Policy as an ally of Iosif Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin. He was certainly what Wynn calls a “moderate Bolshevik,” but for all that he was still a Bolshevik and retained the hard core of self-assuredness in the rightness of his dedication to the party's project. In one of his vitriolic attacks on the United Opposition, Tomskii joked that “under the dictatorship of the proletariat, two, three, or four parties may exist, but only on the single condition that one of them is in power and the others in prison. Anyone who doesn't understand this doesn't know a damn thing about the dictatorship of the proletariat, about the Bolshevik Party” (263). After defeating Tomskii in a ruthless fight within the trade unions, the loyal Stalinist Lazar Kaganovich spoke of democracy only slightly differently: “It could be said this was a violation of proletarian democracy, but comrades it has long been known that for us Bolsheviks, democracy is no fetish” (312). As Wynn puts it, “Tomsky was a moderate Bolshevik, who opposed Stalin's increasingly radical proclivities, but he was also a loyal Bolshevik who believed in party discipline. He never for a second imagined advocating for some sort of multi-party democracy” (292).

The story clearly and persuasively told here is full of ironies, missteps, and fatal failures of the moderates to see the danger presented by Stalin. The infighting within the highest ranks of the Communist Party is central to Wynn's story, though he takes few deep dives into the issues dividing the leaders, investigating paths that might have been taken, or exploring whether there were viable alternatives to Stalin's victory. Wynn believes that Stalinism was more contingent than inevitable, which is an important corrective to the familiar views that tyranny was already present in the genetic code of Marxism or the revolution. In one of the many ironies of Soviet history, Stalin won over other Old Bolsheviks because of his moderation during NEP, his centrist support of a gradualist policy, his pragmatism, and his embrace of collective leadership. When he turned radically to the Left, promoting forced collectivization of agriculture and pell-mell industrialization, he successfully outmaneuvered the moderates and carried the party with him. Embedded in Bolshevik culture was a sense that politics was a species of warfare, and Stalin, certainly more than Tomskii or Bukharin, was ready and willing to wage a ruthless war to secure his will and his autocratic power. Moderates did not have a chance.