ABSTRACT
Opening the Ninth Party Congress on 29 March 1920, Lenin told the delegates they were meeting at the ‘moment’ of victory ‘of the Soviet revolution in the first country to make this revolution’ and ‘victory over the combined forces of world capitalism and imperialism’. He announced another long-awaited event as well: the outbreak of communist revolution in Germany. (A general strike in Berlin had frustrated a right-wing coup, the Kapp Putsch; and in the aftermath, a ‘Red Army’ had sprung up in the Ruhr, and a ‘Soviet Republic’ had been proclaimed in Saxony.) ‘The proletarian Soviet power in Germany’, he said, ‘is spreading irresistibly. The time is not far off when we shall be marching hand in hand with a German Soviet government’.1
