In Russia, a civil war had already begun that was ‘interwoven with a whole series of wars’. The Soviet regime must brace itself for ‘a whole era of . . . imperialist wars, civil wars inside countries, the intermingling of the two, national wars liberating the nationalities oppressed by the imperialists and by various combinations of imperialist powers . . . This epoch, an epoch of gigantic cataclysms, of mass decisions forcibly imposed by war, of crises, has begun . . . and it is only the beginning.’