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THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Saxon, the Slav attempts to realize his ideas in action. But these international forces did not emerge till after the overthrow of the first Revolution. It is important that we should clearly realize the three-cornered nature of the struggle. The first Revolution saw the bourgeois-socialists and the commercial interests overthrowing the war-weakened and disorganized government of officials and native aristocracy which stood in the way of the full commercialization and capitalization of the whole country. It must not be thought that at this stage the internationalists and communists took no part. They had long been maturing their plans and they were content to keep out of sight to start with; at the same time aiding by every means in their power the initial phase of the first Revolution, which must inevitably precede the introduction of their own régime. The commercialists and bourgeois-socialists of the Kerensky régime were used as an indispensable weapon for the attainment of their ends. Lenin, as a Marxian socialist, had, for a great number of years, realized that Russia must first be commercialized before she could be destroyed, as all states must be destroyed in the interests of "internationalism." As far back as 1894, in spite of other differences, he agreed with the constitutional social-democrat (Cadet) Struve, on the "necessity, the inevitability, and the progressive function of Russian capitalism." It was only through the industrialization of Russia that she could be made ripe for his communistic schemes, or rather it was through the partial and incomplete industrialization of the country that she could be made vulnerable at all.

As Lenin represents the very small but energetic group of theoretical international-communists, and who is further