Russia and European Communism

Abstract

The Russian Revolution of 1917 proved to be one of the major formative international influences of the twentieth century and the communism from which it derived was a development of the essentially international creed of socialism which, cutting across national loyalties, called on ‘workers of all countries’ to unite. Yet, contrary to the predictions of Karl Marx, the first successful communist revolution took place in a country whose economy was among the most backward in Europe (just indeed as the second successful communist revolution, that in China some thirty-two years later, took place in one of the most backward economies in Asia); it took place, moreover, in conditions which were peculiarly Russian and which were deeply and permanently to mark communism in its later evolution in other parts of the world. It is thus necessary to look for the formative shaping of communism as much in Russian history as in the particular theories of European socialism and the teachings of Karl Marx from which it stemmed.