[2] Trotsky argued that Russia was a genuine workers' state from the 1917 October Revolution until Joseph Stalin's consolidation of power.
[3] 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.
He argued, however, that whether the downfall led to the restoration of workers' democracy or to capitalist restoration would depend on whether the movement to overthrow the dictatorship of the bureaucracy was led by the organised working class: The inevitable collapse of the Stalinist political regime will lead to the establishment of Soviet democracy only in the event that the removal of Bonapartism comes as the conscious act of the proletarian vanguard.
They differ in the history of how their situation has arisen: through the bureaucratic degeneration of a genuine workers' democracy, as in the Soviet Union; or through the establishment of a deformed workers' state resulting from the overthrow of bourgeois rule and ownership by some force other than the mass action of the organised working class, such as by an invasion, a guerrilla army, or a military coup.
Another theoretical term used by some Trotskyists, most notably Ted Grant, to describe the dictatorial rule of bureaucracies in such "degenerated" or "deformed" workers' states is proletarian bonapartism.