This triumph of bolshevism is the most gigantic ever dreamed of, but the victory is incomplete until every part of Europe has been revolutionized.
A month later, in an open letter to the Italian socialists quoted in Pravda, December 10, 1920, Lenin fearing that the revolutionary movement which began in the seizure of factories by the Italian metal workers might be checked by the refusal of foreign capitalists to furnish the indispensable coal and iron, gave this advice:
Hasten the revolution in England, in France, in America if these countries decide to blockade the proletariat of the Italian Proletarian Republic.
At the National Congress of the Soviets on December 23, the leading economic authority among the Commissaries, Rykoff, said (See Pravda, December 25):
With the possibility of international relations and the coming communistic revolution in western Europe, and since we are nearing our chief aim, the European congress of Soviets, we have to direct our attention to the development of those branches of our economic life which will come to our lot in the case of distribution of work among ourselves and western soviet Europe.
We must note in these expressions that the Bolshevists find no contradiction between the movement for a trade agreement and the continued movement for world revolt. Indeed, Lenin has advocated arrangements with foreign capitalists from the very beginning of the Bolshevik regime, during the period of the revolutions in Hungary and Bavaria, as well as the wars of conquest against
