after the russian revolution every imperialist country on earth, including the US, France, UK, Japan and Italy formed an alliance to, in the words of churchill, "strangle the infant Bolshevism in its crib". here are US troops occupying vladivostok and canadian troops in siberia

they managed to prolong the war for years by supplying and directly aiding the fascist white forces, and then, subsequently, in their history books wrote about the weird "innate tendency to violence" of bolsheviks, their "natural aggression and barbarism", their "irrational fear"

though in the short-term they lost and had to give up their attempt to "strangle baby bolshevism in its crib", their long-term aim was successful: they managed to kill off the leading class-conscious workers and force the bolsheviks to adopt a highly centralized system to survive

if you want to look at the nature of the soviet revolution post-1924, as good historians will tell you, you have to focus on the civil war period, and there is no doubt what was chiefly responsible for shaping it: a crusade by the most powerful countries on earth to destroy it

so whenever I see some liberal or conservative hack whining about "omg lenin was PURE EVIL HE WAS A MONSTER", I attach as much significance to it as I do to a piece of dog-shit on the street. it has the exact same value

though I respect critiques from the left (anarchists, left-communists, workers' opposition), and it's well worth reading them. they were right in many respects, and, crucially, for the right reasons (as opposed to liberal/conservative hacks)

some great books to read on this period, from a variety of left/scholarly perspectives:

Victor Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution
John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World
Paul Avrich, The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution
Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution

some more:

Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd
Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power
Deutscher, The Prophet Armed
E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923
S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories

finally, Moshe Lewin's "Lenin's Last Struggle" is very good, and for a more memoir-like chronicle of this entire period Anton Makarenko's "The Road to Life" is brilliant