ABSTRACT
Among the Russian social democrats, the paradigm of the dependence of socialism on the combined efforts of a number of advanced countries was well entrenched. The Russian social democrats stuck to the Marx and Engels paradigm as a matter of course. The single socialist economy would be a war economy, geared to the project of expanding socialism through military means. Initially, the Great War stiffened the Russian social democrats in their principled internationalism. The RSDWP was one of the few socialist parties that did not fall for the shrill patriotism prevalent in Europe in those days. In December 1914, the revolutionary defeatist Lenin famously declared that he shared the ‘national pride of the Great Russians’. James Ryan aptly calls Lenin’s mentality ‘militarized Marxism’. In 1917 Lenin finally concluded that in Russia too the socialist transition was on the agenda after all.
