Easy: the Bolsheviks were Marxists. Bang, question answered. Except it’s not quite that simple. Or maybe it is and I’m in the mood to over-complicate things. Let’s work through the layers and see the problems in tracing Marx’s influence through the decades.

Ideology

Let’s start with the obvious: the Bolshevik/Communist Party was Marxist. Its ideological roots were very much influenced by the Marxism of the Second International period, to which a number of leading Bolsheviks (most obviously Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin) contributed prominently. Marx’s writings were absolutely central to their worldview: to take a prominent example, Lenin’s seminal State and Revolution of 1917 repeatedly leans on Marx for authority, quoting long passages of his work. This held true after the revolution, despite the various compromises (see below), the Bolsheviks continued to view the world through the prism of class struggle and class dictatorship. Even in the 1930s, when state policy was stretching the definition of ‘socialism’ to breaking point, private correspondence between Stalin and his colleagues shows that the Communist elite continued to ‘speak Marxist’, writing off their enemies on the basis of social class.

So the official answer to your question is simple: Marxism was the guiding principle of the Soviet regime, whose actions were therefore heavily influence by Marx.

Practice

But if the Bolsheviks were ideologically Marxist then surely the policies they enacted were those of Marx? Not quite. One of the longstanding fault-lines in Soviet historiography is the question of the degree to which Bolshevik principles informed Bolshevik policies. To return to the above example, the Soviet state that did emerge looked nothing like that outlined in State and Revolution, so was this a propaganda piece that hid Lenin’s true ambitions for a dictatorship or did the Bolsheviks try to implement these policies but were thwarted by the economic, social and political fragmentation/collapse that greeted their arrival at power?

Most sensible historians (ie those that I agree with) would argue that it was a combination of both. The Bolsheviks had a very strong ideological worldview that they derived from Marxist traditions, as above. Major components of this included a reliance on class analysis, a firm belief in centralisation, fear of the market, etc. These principles governed how they reacted to events but it was these events themselves that were setting the agenda of government. There was no real blueprint for governance and limited ability to implement an ideological programme. War with Germany, economic catastrophe, collapse of the transport system, bureaucratic opposition, Civil War, famine, flight from the cities, etc… these all interfered with state-building or social transformation. Reading Marx hadn’t really prepared the Bolsheviks for them.

To give a significant and early example of this, post-October Lenin had originally advocated the maintenance of a capitalist class to run industry under a regime of ‘state capitalism’. Yet the course of events - particularly pressure from below and international circumstances – effectively forced the nationalisation decree of June 1918. Nonetheless, the form of nationalisation (stressing central state control and minimising opportunities for worker management of production) bore the stamp of Bolshevik ideology.

Marx?

So the Bolsheviks were Marxists who put their Marxism into practice in an ad hoc and event-driven way, right? Not quite. What actually was the influence of Marx himself on this Marxism? Even today you’ll have trouble answering that question. Marx produced about three decades worth of work and there are countless different shades of interpretation.

But let’s get one thing straight: there is no one Marxist blueprint for a socialist/communist society. Marx’s work was first and foremost concerned with producing a critique of capitalism. From his analysis of the present he ventured a few notions of what the future might look like but only the vaguest terms. When the Bolsheviks became the first Marxist party to actually seize power at the head of a popular revolution they were effectively entering unknown territory, ideologically speaking. All they really had was an existing framework of thought and even this was suspect.

To pick up State and Revolution again, this work draws heavily on Marx’s own writings to propose a thesis that sharply contradicts the Marxism of the Second International, which was the leading pre-war collection of Marxist parties. In 1917 Lenin made a firm break with more conventional Marxism and sparked a war of polemics with other European Marxists, most notably Karl Kautsky. (To the point that he was condemned as a semi-anarchist by some.) Both sides drew heavily on Marx to argue that theirs was the ‘correct’ Marxism. Not only did the Bolsheviks not have a monopoly on Marx but their claims to his name/ideas were hotly contested at the time.

(To further complicate matters, both groups were working from incomplete sources. It wasn’t until the 1930s, in Moscow, that Marx’s Collected Works began to be published. For example, all parties in these debates were ignorant of the Grundrisse, a key text by Marx that wasn’t published until 1939.)

So at the very moment that the Marxist Bolsheviks were preparing to seize power, the very nature of their Marxism was under question. Both abroad and at home (the Mensheviks) there were those who argued that Bolshevik principles were entirely un-Marxist. Who was right? Which would Marx have agreed with? Take your pick.

Wrapping up

So the Bolsheviks were pretty adamant that they were Marxist but this was not uncontested. Similarly, when it came to putting actual policies into effect they weren’t working to any Marxist master plan; their actions were a combination of politics, principle and circumstance. Even then, there were a variety of factors, of which Marx was but one, that shaped these Bolshevik principles and worldview.

Where does this all leave us when it comes to gauging Marx’s influence? Bereft of easy answers, to be sure. There’s no question that Marx was a major influence on the Bolsheviks but mapping this directly onto post-1917 policies (even key “economic and political ideals”) is difficult, if not pointless. You won’t find Marx elaborating Five Year Plans or collectivisation or de-kulakisation campaigns. He never drew up plans for village soviets or balancing trade with the peasantry. Like most popular political theorists, you can take from Marx what you want.

All of which is a very long-winded way of saying that Marx was influential but determining exactly how this manifested itself in Bolshevik Russia is not easy.

Sources

A lot of general works have informed the above. For more specific works, I’d particularly recommend James D White’s Lenin: Theory and Practice of Revolution for an introduction to the development of Lenin’s thought. Hobsbawm’s Revolutionaries is also worth a read for situating Bolshevism in its historical context. On the key question of theory v practice in Bolshevik governance, Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War tackles the question across a number of essays. Thomas Remington’s Building Socialism in Bolshevik Russia poses the same question as a political conflict between mobilisation and state-building.