p In the acute ideological battles raging in the modern world Marxist-Leninist ideas, mobilising and rallying the masses to struggle for communism, have an ever greater role to play. It is also ever more important to study Lenin’s rich ideological legacy, and the experience of his ideological fight against various forms and lines of ideology alien and hostile to socialism. This legacy of Lenin’s is inexhaustible, and it is an extremely pressing task to master it.

Effective comprehension of Lenin’s experience in the ideological struggle is important, first, because criticism and exposure of views alien and hostile to Marxism constitute an integral, organic part of the further development of Marxism (something Lenin brilliantly demonstrated as he enriched and developed Marxism precisely in the course of a relentless fight against its ideological adversaries); second, because Lenin’s struggle against bourgeois ideology and opportunism makes it possible to understand and bring out the scientific principles on which he had relied and, consequently, to adopt them for the struggle today, and finally, because the experience of Lenin’s ideological struggle helps to define the concrete tasks and guidelines of the present-day ideological struggle. Lenin brilliantly anticipated the essential regularities and tendencies in the development of the struggle of ideas, and present-day bourgeois and opportunist views are frequently no more than modernised versions of the old ideas Lenin had debunked.