Trotsky held that in Russia between the 1917 October Revolution and up to Joseph Stalin's consolidation of power, there was a genuine workers' state. The bourgeoisie had been politically overthrown by the working class and the economic basis of that state lay in collective ownership of the means of production. Contrary to the predictions of many socialists such as Lenin, the revolution failed to spread to Germany and other industrial Western European countries (although there were massive upheavals of working people in some of these countries), and consequently the Soviet state began to degenerate. This was worsened by the material and political degeneration of the Russian working class by the Civil War of 1917–1923.