Page 285 - SELECTED WORKS OF MAO TSE-TUNG Volume IV.indd

REVOLUTIONARY FORCES OF THE WORLD UNITE,
FIGHT AGAINST IMPERIALIST AGGRESSION! *

November 1948

At this time, when the awakened working class and all genuine
revolutionaries of the world are jubilantly celebrating the thirty-first
anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution of the Soviet
Union, I recall a well-known article by Stalin, written in 1918 on the
first anniversary of that revolution. In that article Stalin said:

The great world-wide significance of the October Revolution
chiefly consists in the fact that:
1) It has widened the scope of the national question and
converted it from the particular question of combating national
oppression in Europe into the general question of emancipating
the oppressed peoples, colonies and semi-colonies from
imperialism;
2) It has opened up wide possibilities for their emancipation
and the right paths towards it, has thereby greatly facilitated the
cause of the emancipation of the oppressed peoples of the West
and the East, and has drawn them into the common current of
the victorious struggle against imperialism;
3) It has thereby erected a bridge between the socialist West
and the enslaved East, having created a new front of revolutions
against world imperialism, extending from the proletarians of the
West, through the Russian revolution, to the oppressed peoples of
the East. 1
History has developed in the direction pointed out by Stalin. The
October Revolution has opened up wide possibilities for the eman-
cipation of the peoples of the world and opened up the realistic paths
towards it; it has created a new front of revolutions against world
imperialism, extending from the proletarians of the West, through the
Russian revolution, to the oppressed peoples of the East. This front

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