p Guided by Lenin’s theory of the socialist revolution, Russia’s working class, in alliance with the peasants and headed by the Bolshevik Party, abolished the rule of the landlords and capitalists, and took political power into its own hands. 7 November 1917 has gone down in history as the beginning of a new era in mankind’s development—the era of the fall of capitalism and the triumph of the new, socialist society. “From now on,” Lenin said on that historic day, “a new phase in the history of Russia begins, and this, the third Russian revolution, should in the end lead to the victory of socialism.”  [316•* 

p His words were prophetic. The more than 60 years that have passed since that day have strikingly proved the correctness of the ideas of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism. Mankind saw the rise of a true socialist society whose very existence repudiates exploitation and all forms of social oppression. The building of developed socialism and the Soviet Union’s entry into the period of communist construction are the main result of the growth of Soviet society since the Great October Socialist Revolution.

p This revolution gave a powerful impetus to the world revolutionary movement, contributed to the further disintegration of the capitalist system and deepened the general crisis of capitalism. It inaugurated the transition from capitalism to socialism.

After the Second World War a number of countries in Central and Southeast Europe and Asia fell away from the capitalist system. Capitalism ceased to be the only world socio-economic system. Two systems now exist in the world—moribund capitalism and the young and growing socialism.