p The experience that has been gained in building socialism in the U.S.S.R. and other countries makes it possible to assert that the basic ways and means of building the new society are intransient. They have repeated and will continue to repeat themselves under conformable conditions in countries that have embarked upon socialist construction. They thereby acquire the significance of general laws governing the transition from capitalism to socialism.

p Yet these general laws do not by any means operate identically in different countries. Each country building socialism has its own level of economic and cultural development, history, natural conditions and reserves of natural wealth, the balance of class forces, national peculiarities, way of thinking and traditions, and so forth. Besides, the international conditions under which the various countries build socialism likewise differ. Hence, in each country the transition from capitalism to socialism has features of its own. “All nations,” Lenin wrote, “will arrive at socialism—this is inevitable, but all will do so in not exactly the same way, each will contribute something of its own to some form of democracy, to some variety of the dictatorship of the proletariat, to the varying rate of socialist transformations in the different aspects of social life.”  [152•**  In the different 153 countries, the features of socialist construction concern not the essence but the forms, methods, rates and intensity of socialist transformations. This does not in the least abrogate the general laws.

Let us now dwell in greater detail on the unity between the general laws and the diverse forms of socialist construction in different countries.