bolshevism

[Gordon Fitch]

> This was prior to Lenin's "April Theses" of 1917. The idea that Russia could
> survive as a bourgeois democratic state was relegated to the Mensheviks. The
> point was that Russia would have been left behind economically by the
> capitalists because it was so large. If it was a small, developed country in
> northern or western Europe, well, that would have been another story. Full
> bourgeois capitalism would have relegated Russia immediately to the third
> world. The events since 1990 have borne this out almost a century later.
> 
> In the "April Theses," Lenin characterized Russia as, among other things,
> "state capitalist" because he understood that Russia could not develop to
> true socialism without the aid of socialist revolution in other countries,
> especially the developed ones. Stalin, of course, overturned the concept of
> permanent revolution as "Trotskyist" and instead promoted the revisionist
> notion of "socialism in one country."

Chris Doss:
> Russia's not quite third world (itr's not first world either, of course). 
> Last year, Russia came in sometimes like 15th place in terms of industrial 
> production. Russia is a developed industrial country.

How did the Russian Empire stand just prior to World War I?
That would be what Lenin (or an alternative to Lenin) would
have had to work with.

-- Gordon