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apply it to more than the fundamental features of our revolution. It would be likewise erroneous to keep in mind that, after the proletarian revolution in at least one of the advanced countries, things will in all probability take a sharp turn; Russia will cease to be the model, and will become again the backward (in the "Soviet" and Socialist sense) country.
But at this historical moment such is the state of affairs that the Russian example reveals something quite essential to all countries in their near and inevitable future. The advanced workers in every land have long understood it—although in many cases they did not so much understand it as feel it, through the instinct of their revolutionary class. Hence the international "significance" (in the strict sense of the word) of the Soviet power, as well as of the fundamentals of Bolshevik theory and tactics. This the "revolutionary" leaders of the Second International—Kautsky in Germany, Otto Bauer and Friedrich Adler in Austria—failed to understand and, therefore, turned into reactionaries and advocates of the worst kind of opportunism and social treason. The anonymous pamphlet, The World Revolution, which appeared in 1919 in Vienna, shows plainly their whole process of thought or, what is more correct, all their appalling imbecility, pedantry, dastardliness and betrayal of working-class interests under the guise of "defending" the idea of "world revolution." Of this pamphlet we shall speak at greater length on some other occasion. Here we shall remark only this: that in the time, now long gone by, when Kautsky was yet a follower of Marx and not the renegade he is today, approaching the question as an historian, he foresaw the possibility of the revolutionary spirit of the Russian proletariat serving as an example for Western Europe. This was in 1902, when Kautsky wrote an article headed "The Slavs and the Revolution," published in the revolutionary organ, Iskra. This is what he wrote:—
"At the present time (in contradistinction to the year 1848) it may be assumed that not only have the Slavs entered the ranks of the revolutionary peoples, but that the center of gravity of revolutionary thought and revolutionary action is moving farther and farther to the Slavs. The revolutionary center is moving from the West to the East. In the first half of the
