ABSTRACT
The most profound crisis suffered by international socialism was precipitated by the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo in August 1914. V. L Lenin's advocacy of national self-determination was indeed instrumental in that he believed it would serve a higher purpose. Lenin was forced by the press of circumstances to focus his immediate attention on the political and economic transformation of Russian society under Bolshevism. The Third International was Leninist in form and Russian in content. Dominated by Russians from the beginning, with its headquarters in Moscow, the structure of the Third International was highly centralized in order to guarantee support for Lenin's international program. Joseph Stalin, as the emerging leader of the Soviet Union, was to put his own unique stamp on the development of international communism. The implications of the failure of the Western revolutions were no less profound for Soviet domestic development than they had been for the orientation of the International.
