p Bourgeois social thought, starting from the dogma of capitalism being everlasting, found the key facts of modern history to be an insuperable barrier. The great forces of the old world proved to be unable to stop the revolutionary advance of the working class. Their political, economic and ideological impotence was most pronounced where they had appeared to be strongest, where they acted as the mainstay of European and Asian reaction—in tsarist Russia. In his work What Is To Be Done? (1902) Lenin wrote: “History has now confronted us with an immediate task which is the most revolutionary of all the immediate tasks confronting the proletariat of any country. The fulfilment of this task, the destruction of the most powerful bulwark, not only of European, but (it may now be said) of Asiatic reaction, would make the Russian proletariat the vanguard of the international revolutionary proletariat.”  [326•1 

p The theorists and ideologists of the bourgeoisie believed the victory of the revolution in Russia to be a miracle. They wrote a great many books and, the slanders and conscious falsifications apart, they were absolutely sincere on one point: they did not understand how the miracle had taken place and how the great revolutionary force took shape at a turning point in history, when real prerequisites had been created for revolutionary change, enabling Lenin to say that there was a party that could take over. This Party gave a lead to the broadest masses of people and guided them with great skill in carrying out a great revolution. Bourgeois theorists holding forth about the October Revolution missed the whole history of the political, economic and ideological bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie in Russia. That was an expression of the class short-sightedness of bourgeois political thinking, which had prevented them from discerning the contours of the objective historical process.

p The ideologists of imperialism did not see, first, how it was so acutely evident in Russia that politically, economically and ideologically the bourgeoisie was powerless to cope with the contradictions of the epoch of imperialism, of which the First World War was a most vivid expression with all its dire consequences for the people. They failed to see, second, that it was in Russia that capitalism had proved to be incapable of overcoming the country’s backwardness, of raising the underdeveloped areas and carrying the country along the path of progress. They were unable to understand, third, how the new historical 327 force was born in the form of the Leninist Party, all of whose activity relied on the alliance of the working class and the peasantry, to see the social energy latent in this alliance and the importance of Leninism and the Communist Party for awakening this mighty energy.

p The theorists of bourgeois parties also failed to understand how and why the bankruptcy of social opportunism was accelerated by the revolution in Russia. They failed to notice the major turns in the class struggle at which opportunism lost more and more of its ideological and political influence on the masses. Bourgeois theorists failed to see that the correct tactics used by the Bolsheviks before and after the socialist revolution impelled Menshevism to disintegrate, and put the opportunist leaders into isolation, while the best workers and the best elements of petty-bourgeois democracy sided with Bolshevism. They failed to notice that the ideological banners of social opportunism were incinerated in the flames of the Civil War.

p Furthermore, it is extremely important to note that the social thought of the bourgeoisie was unable to understand that the process which was accelerated in Russia a hundredfold by the course of the revolution, continued after the October Revolution throughout the world, even if at a slower pace. There is growing evidence that the bourgeoisie is unable to cope with the deep-going contradictions of the epoch of imperialism. Its policy tends to aggravate these contradictions.

But what most clearly exposed the impotence of bourgeois social thought was the problem of the attitude to take to the ideas of communism and then to the communist reality.