ABSTRACT
The most amazing phenomenon in the history of the modern Socialist movement has indeed been the unprecedented spread of Socialist ideas across the world. The Socialist idea, however, has permeated all cultural fields, has inspired the thinking of all races, has become the fundamental principle for nations containing a third of humanity. It acts as the social dynamic in the process of change of the highly developed capitalist social order of Europe as much as of the pre-capitalist one of the peoples of Asia and Africa freed from colonial rule. For a definition of Socialism, there always have been and there are a number of theories. Under the impact of the February revolution in Russia in 1917, Lenin revised Marx's theory of the evolution of Socialism. The Communist revolution, inspired by the shining vision of Socialism—'a realm of freedom', in Engels's words— had in fact by force of circumstance created an empire of universal servitude.
