slow progress (compared with the rate of progress of combined European economy) is not the negation of the possibility of constructing Socialism in our country. This slow rate of progress merely expresses the enormous difficulties of our work of construction.
This is how the question of the possibility of constructing Socialism in a single country should be decided. In order to link up this question with certain other more general questions, we take the liberty to recall the following. During the controversy of 1923, we said: If comrade Trotsky is right and our country should be unable to maintain the proletarian dictatorship without the State aid of the Western proletariat, owing to our conflicts with the peasantry, then some very important conclusions follow. If we spread the proletarian revolution over the whole world we shall obtain approximately the same proportion between the proletariat and the peasantry as we have in the Soviet Union. For, when the proletariat takes power in England, it will have to deal with India and the other British colonies; if the proletariat takes power in France it will have to deal with Africa; if the proletariat takes power in all countries it will have to deal with all the other peasant countries. The world proletariat will have to solve the problem of how to live in harmony with the world peasantry. And if the proportion is approximately the same as that in the Soviet Union, then, drawing the corresponding conclusion from the theory of inevitable doom unless aid comes from without, willy-nilly we come to the Cunow presentation, according to which the world is "not yet mature" for the social revolution.
There is an enormous number of peasants in the world who according to Trotsky will "inevitably"
