The Permanent Revolution, and, Results and Prospects

the village. This perspective remains in force for the whole preparatory period, that is, until the victorious revolution in the advanced countries liberates the Soviet Union out of its present isolated position. Some of the thoughts expressed here are developed in greater detail in other works of the author, particularly in the Draft Program of the Comintern : A Criticism of Fundamentals. The considerations brought out above are sufficient, let us hope, to reveal the whole significance of the struggle of principles that was carried on in recent years, and is carried on now in the form of contrasting two theories : socialism in one country and the permanent revolution* Only this timely significance of the question justifies the fact that we present here to foreign readers a book which is largely devoted to a critical re-establishment of the pre-revolutionary prognoses and theoretical disputes among the Russian Marxists. We could, of course, have selected a different form of expounding the questions that interest us. But this form was never created by the author, and was not selected by him of his own accord. It was imposed upon him partly by opponents and partly by the very course of political development. Even the truths of mathematics, the most abstract of the sciences, can best of all be learned in connection with the history of their discovery. This applies even more to the more concrete, that is, to the historically conditioned truths of Marxist policy. The history of the origin and development of the prognoses of the revolution in the conditions of pre-revolutionary Russia will, we think, bring the reader much closer and far more concretely to the-