ABSTRACT
The idea of single-country socialism means two things: a revolutionary country surrounded by hostile capitalist states must be able to organise its own socialist economy, and it must be able to prevent or survive military intervention. Lenin accepted socialism in one country for Soviet Russia. Lenin confirmed that in case of ‘the victory of socialism in one country and the preservation of capitalism in the neighbouring countries’, revolutionary war would become inevitable. The communist revolution can be victorious only as a world revolution, Bukharin and Preobrazhenskii insisted, because if the workers seized power only in one country, then ‘in the end the great robber States would crush the workers’ State. Lenin’s confidence in the ability of isolated Russia to establish a socialist economy is the more remarkable if we regard it in a comparative perspective. The formulated view that the Soviet state existed in a ‘system of states’, and that its prolonged existence next to the imperialist states was ‘unthinkable’.
