The Russian Revolution and The World
Leon Trotsky said that the goal of socialism in Russia would not be realized without the success of the world revolution. Indeed, a revolutionary wave caused by the Russian Revolution lasted until 1923. Despite initial hopes for success in the German Revolution of 1918–1919, in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic and others like it, no other Marxist movement succeeded in keeping power in its hands.
This issue is subject to conflicting views on the communist history by various Marxist groups and parties. Joseph Stalin later rejected this idea, stating that socialism was possible in one country.
The confusion regarding Stalin's position on the issue stems from the fact that he, after Lenin's death in 1924, successfully used Lenin's argument — the argument that socialism's success needs the workers of other countries in order to happen — to defeat his competitors within the party by accusing them of betraying Lenin and, therefore, the ideals of the October Revolution.
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“Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit;Mnot to be reckoned one character;Mnot to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south?”
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“An illustrious individual remarks that Mrs. [Elizabeth Cady] Stanton is the salt, Anna Dickinson the pepper, and Miss [Susan B.] Anthony the vinegar of the Female Suffrage movement. The very elements get the “white male” into a nice pickle.”
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