Socialism in One Country: A Reassessment

Abstract

Until 1917 Lenin and Trotsky believed that an isolated revolutionary Russia would have no chance of survival. However, from 1917 to 1923 Lenin's standpoint on this matter underwent a complete reversal. First he came to the conclusion that socialism could be built in an isolated Russia, although it would remain ‘incomplete’ in the absence of the world revolution. By 1923 he was abandoning that latter qualification too. The standpoint of Stalin and Bukharin in the debate on ‘socialism in one country’ of 1925–26 was more ‘orthodox-Leninist’ than the position taken by Trotsky, who had at first also embraced the notion of ‘incomplete socialism’, but subsequently returned to the old concept, abandoned by Lenin, that the restoration of capitalism was inevitable in the absence of the world revolution.