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On the 100th Anniversary of the Russian Socialist Revolution

By Ricardo Cohen - Secretary General- PCR – Uruguay, Contribution A12 to point 2 of the International Seminar, 14 September 2017


The triumph of the Russian Socialist Revolution in 1917 shocked the whole world and had a great impact on the development of the international proletarian revolution. Meaning of a great leap for humanity for the first time in the history of the great oppressed masses, led by the working class and its party, in the alliance with the poor peasants, succeeded in taking power through a triumphant insurrection, which later spread to all that vast territory and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, the power of the Soviets, and for decades to build socialism, a society without exploited or exploiters.

The October Revolution, led by the Lenin-led Bolshevik Party, opened up a whole period of triumphant proletarian revolutions, which continued after the Second World War, with the gigantic Chinese Revolution, a period in which socialism developed in the third part of humanity, as it also settled in Eastern Europe, and later in Korea, Cuba and Vietnam, in a revolutionary wave that embraced the entire world.

The Russian proletariat showed to the world that in the epoch of imperialism, the upper phase of capitalism, the proletarian revolution was placed on the order of the day, that it was developed in stages and in an uninterrupted way, the bourgeois-democratic that overthrew czarism in February and the socialist of October. He demonstrated that he could triumph initially in a single country, where, although there was an accelerated capitalist development, it was a backward country, by the ballast of feudalism, in relation to the European powers and to the United States.

Lenin said: "The inequality of economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. It follows that the victory of socialism begins by a few capitalist countries, or even by a single capitalist country. The triumphant proletariat of this country, then expropriating the capitalists and organizing socialist production within its borders, will face the rest of the capitalist world, attracting the oppressed classes of the other countries to its side, raising in them the insurrection against capitalists, employing, if necessary, even the force of arms against the exploiting classes and their states. " ("The slogan of the United States of Europe”)

It showed the world proletariat how the revolution is made, the general features of the proletarian revolution in the era of capitalist imperialism, and by bringing this gigantic task into practice, with everything new that it had to solve, it also developed Marxism with essential contributions that took him to a new stage, Marxism-Leninism

The Chinese Revolution, with Mao Tse-tung at the head of the CPC, developed the revolutionary process, through a prolonged popular war, from the countryside to the city, which liberated red areas in which the democratic-popular state of New Democracy, and that on October 1, 1949, with the seizure of power throughout the country begins the socialist stage.

As in Russia the proletariat was the class of vanguard of the revolution, but in China the peasantry was the main driving force.

Mao resolves, on the theoretical basis of Marxism-Leninism, new and fundamental problems of the proletarian revolution, in theory and in practice, which have to do with the characteristics of revolutions in countries oppressed by imperialism.

It faces the modern revisionism, headed by Khrushchev, triumphed at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956, changing the class character of the CPSU and the State, opening the way to the restoration of capitalism in the USSR. It shows that the rise of revisionism to power is the rise of the bourgeoisie to power.

With this real tragedy for the international working class and the oppressed peoples of the world, socialism, as Marx and Lenin put it, implies a long historical period in which classes and class struggle continue to exist, the struggle between the path socialist and capitalist and the danger of capitalist restoration, in addition to imperialist aggression and intervention.

Modern revisionism extended to most of the Communist Parties of the world and had in Rodney Arismendi, its main exponent in Uruguay, that with its revisionist clique manages to cover the direction of the Communist Party from the 16th Congress, of 1955.

The liquidation process began there, with the abandonment of revolutionary positions, congress after congress, turning a revolutionary proletarian party into a reformist electoral party, subordinated entirely to the interests of the USSR, which had been converted into a social-imperialist power since 1957.


Mao and the PCCH fight in the International Communist Movement and carry on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, beginning in 1966, which resists revisionism and capitalist restoration in China for ten years.

Their contributions in the most diverse fields, meant the development of Marxism to a new stage, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.

With the defeat of this revolution and the rise of Ten Siao-ping, after Mao's death (9/9/76), revisionism succeeds in the PCCH, and the process of capitalist restoration takes place also in China. This closes a cycle of progress and development of the Proletarian Revolution worldwide.


This whole rich historical period was initiated and influenced by the Russian Revolution, a great part of a century where hundreds of millions of exploited men and women of the world made gigantic sacrifices, made the present history, carried out Socialism, demonstrating in practice its superiority to capitalism and left lessons to be taken by the working class and oppressed peoples of the world to carry out a new cycle of triumphant proletarian revolutions.

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