Given the defeats of the 1917–1923 European communist revolutions,[b] Joseph Stalin developed and encouraged the theory of the possibility of constructing socialism in the Soviet Union alone.
Vladimir Lenin died in January 1924 and by the end of that year in the second edition of the book Stalin's position started to turn around as he claimed that "the proletariat can and must build the socialist society in one country".
[6] In April 1925, Nikolai Bukharin elaborated the issue in his brochure Can We Build Socialism in One Country in the Absence of the Victory of the West-European Proletariat?
[8] In his 1915 article On the Slogan for a United States of Europe, Lenin maintained that proletarian victory would be uneven and arrive through individual capitalist nations' conversions to socialism.
strongly argued in the negative, basing his argument upon the economic and historic importance of the world market, claiming that it had "already brought all the peoples of the Earth, [...] into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others".
[17] With the proletarian revolutions in other countries having been either crushed or altogether failed to materialize, the nascent Soviet Union found itself encircled by capitalist or pre-capitalist states.
The plan was based on, firstly, building a close class alliance between the proletariat and the vast masses of the small peasantry (with assured proletarian leadership of the peasantry), and secondly, constructing a complete socialist society in Russia whilst patiently awaiting and aiding the worldwide class struggle to mature into a world revolution in order to hasten the final victory of socialism.
They argue that in the 1915 article On the Slogan for a United States of Europe the expression "triumph of socialism [...] possible in [...] a single capitalist country" in context refers only to the initial establishment of a proletarian political and economic regime and not to the eventual construction of a complete socialist society which would take generations.
Deutscher recounted a party meeting in which David Riazanov, Soviet historian and founder of Marx-Engels Institute derided Stalin with the words "Stop it Koba, don't make a fool of yourself.
[21] According to political scientist Baruch Knei-Paz, Trotsky's theory of "permanent revolution" was grossly misrepresented by Stalin as defeatist and adventurist in antithesis to his proposed "socialism in one country" policy to secure victory during the succession struggle.