V.I. Lenin, the central leader of the world's first socialist revolution, fought a political battle in 1922 and 1923 that would be his last. At the center of the debate was the question of whether the revolution could maintain its proletarian orientation, which brought workers and peasants to power in the former tsarist empire in October 1917, and set the foundation for the formation of an international revolutionary movement of workers in the footsteps of the Bolsheviks.

"Who will win?" Lenin asked in March 1922. After years of war, famine, and the devastation of the country, will workers and peasants continue to resist the capitalist world that ominously surrounds the Soviet Republic? Above all, will they be able to confront the bourgeois classes and their self-interested allies that are developing within the state, even within the mechanism of the Communist Party?

This book brings together for the first time the speeches, texts, and letters through which Lenin fought this battle, some of which have deliberately remained unpublished for decades.