I mean, he wasn’t happy about it. He more or less saw the Russian revolution as the last stop off the train before it ran itself towards oblivion (he was kind of a mix of Marx and Proudhon in that way), because he thought that if Tsarist Russia had it’s traditional boot off of Germany, the German proletariat would become the real vanguard of the revolution, which could then take on the real enemy (the British). And then when that didn’t happen (failed) in 1918 and then again in 1923 (right before he died) he generally became much more pessimistic about seeing a way off the tracks, and it is this line of thinking that was most influential to Stalin, because while he believed Lenin’s theories and observations, because of the success of their revolution he also believed that with organization and sacrifice, they could still get off the tracks. And so they did, for a time, but they didn’t quite forsee the U.S. becoming what it became (even though Marx in his later letters to Engels did predict that if anywhere was the last place to experience a profit decline crisis it would be the U.S. because of how large and relatively uninhabited it is).
I mean, he wasn’t happy about it. He more or less saw the Russian revolution as the last stop off the train before it ran itself towards oblivion (he was kind of a mix of Marx and Proudhon in that way), because he thought that if Tsarist Russia had it’s traditional boot off of Germany, the German proletariat would become the real vanguard of the revolution, which could then take on the real enemy (the British). And then when that didn’t happen (failed) in 1918 and then again in 1923 (right before he died) he generally became much more pessimistic about seeing a way off the tracks, and it is this line of thinking that was most influential to Stalin, because while he believed Lenin’s theories and observations, because of the success of their revolution he also believed that with organization and sacrifice, they could still get off the tracks. And so they did, for a time, but they didn’t quite forsee the U.S. becoming what it became (even though Marx in his later letters to Engels did predict that if anywhere was the last place to experience a profit decline crisis it would be the U.S. because of how large and relatively uninhabited it is).