The Russian October Revolution and the Spread of Marxism in China

In April 1945, Mao Zedong said in his Report “On the Working Principles of the Seventh National Congress of the CPC”: “Marx and Engels founded the Marxist theory in 1843 (three years after the Opium War), but from 1843 to 1917, and for 74 years, the influence was mainly confined to Europe, and most people in the world did not know that there was a theory called Marxism.” “No one in China really knew about Marxist communism before.”

In 1917, the October Socialist Revolution took place in Russia, which brought Marxism-Leninism to China. The October Revolution helped the world and China's advanced progressive elements to reconsider their problems with the proletarian cosmology as a tool for observing the fate of the country and following the Russian path to revolution—that was the conclusion.

The reason why the October Revolution became a great driving force for Chinese advanced progressive elements to accept Marxism was that the October Revolution had given the Chinese revelations including: The economically and culturally backward countries could also use socialist ideology to guide themselves to the path of liberation; the new socialist Russia born in the October Revolution called for the opposition to imperialism and treated China with a new equal attitude, which greatly promoted the spread of socialist ideas in China; and the fact that the masses of Russian workers, peasants and soldiers were widely mobilized in the October Revolution and won a historic victory gave the advanced elements of China the New Enlightenment of revolutionary methods, and promoted them to study the doctrine that the revolution followed. A group of China's most outstanding progressive elements, after their own exploration, had come to the road of Marxism.