ABSTRACT
In Russia socialist hostility towards the tsarist régime was still total in 1914, and the refusal by both the Menshevik and the Bolshevik members of the Duma to vote for the war credits did not come as a surprise. The gulf between the establishment and the socialist movement was greater in Russia than in any other major country at war. As for Lenin's brand of 'revolutionary defeatism', both Russian and non-Russian Marxists denounced the concept as illogical and harmful to the socialist cause. The Russian revolution did produce a revolutionary upsurge in Germany, but chiefly because the Kaiser's army had to fight on two fronts and had suffered a crushing defeat in the west, which spelt victory for her remaining enemies. The notion of the Russian revolution spreading to the advance capitalist countries was already present in Lenin's strategic calculations.
