--------------- Lenin wrote about this in "Tasks of the Proletariat in our Revolution" in April 1917:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/tasks/ch07.htm
(an excerpt:)
11. The Soviets of Workers', Soldiers', Peasants' and other Deputies are not understood, not only in the sense that their class significance, their role in the Russian revolution, is not clear to the majority. They are not understood also in the sense that they constitute a new form or rather a new type of state.
The most perfect, the most advanced type of bourgeois state is the parliamentary democratic republic: power is vested in parliament; the state machine, the apparatus and organ of administration, is of the customary kind: the standing army, the police, and the bureaucracy -- which in practice is undisplaceable, is privileged and stands abovethe people.
Since the end of the nineteenth century, however, revolutionary epochs have advanced a highertype of democratic state, a state which in certain respects, as Engels put it, ceases to be a state, is "no longer a state in the proper sense of the word". This is a state of the Paris Commune type, one in which a standing army and police divorced from the people are replaced by the direct arming of the people themselves. It is this featurethat constitutes the very essence of the Commune, which has been so misrepresented and slandered by the bourgeois writers, and to which has been erroneously ascribed, among other things, the intention of immediately "introducing" socialism.
This is the type of state which the Russian revolution beganto create in 1905 and in 1917. A Republic of Soviets of Workers', Soldiers', Peasants', and other Deputies, united in an All-Russia Constituent Assembly of people's representatives or in a Council of Soviets, etc., is what is already being realisedin our country now, at this juncture. It is being realised by the initiative of the nation's millions, who are creating a democracy on their own, in their own waywithout waiting until the Cadet professors draft their legislative bills for a parliamentary bourgeois republic, or until the pedants and routine-worshippers of petty-bourgeois "Social-Democracy", like Mr. Plekhanov or Kautsky, stop distorting the Marxist teaching on the state.
Marxism differs from anarchism in that it recognises the needfor a state and for state power in the period of revolution in general, and in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism in particular.
Marxism differs from the petty-bourgeois, opportunist "Social-Democratism" of Plekhanov, Kautsky and Co. in that it recognises that what is required during these two periods is nota state of the usual parliamentary bourgeois republican type, but a state of the Paris Commune type.