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Tactics should be constructed on a sober and strictly objective consideration of the forces of a given country (and of the countries surrounding it, and of all countries, on a world scale), as well as on an evaluation of the experience of other revolutionary movements. To manifest one's revolutionism solely by dint of swearing at parliamentary opportunism, by rejecting participation in parliaments, is very easy: but, just because it is too easy, it is not the solution of a difficult, a most difficult, problem. In most European states, the creation of a really revolutionary parliamentary group is much more difficult than it was in Russia. Of course. But this is only one aspect of the general truth that it was easy for Russia, in the concrete, historically quite unique, situation of 1917, to begin a social revolution; whereas to continue it and complete it will be more difficult for Russia than for other European countries.
Already at the beginning of 1918 I had occasion to point out this circumstance, and since then an experience of two years entirely corroborates this point of view. Certain specific conditions existed in Russia which do not at present exist in Western Europe, and a repetition of such conditions in another country is not very probable. These specific conditions were (1) the possibility of connecting the Soviet Revolution with the conclusion, thanks to it, of the imperialist war which had exhausted the workers and peasants to an incredible extent; (2) the possibility of making use, for a certain time, of the deadly struggle of two world-powerful groups of imperialist plunderers, who were unable to unite against their Soviet enemy; (3) the possibility of withstanding a comparatively lengthy civil war, partly because of the gigantic dimensions of the country and the bad means of communication; (4) the existence of such a profound bourgeois-revolutionary movement amongst the peasantry that the proletarian party included in its program the revolutionary demands of the peasant party (the Socialist Revolutionaries, a party sharply hostile to Bolshevism), and at once realized these demands through the proletarian conquest of political power.
The absence of these specific conditions—not to mention various minor ones—accounts for the greater difficulty which Western Europe must experience in beginning the social revo-
