Q. Countries like China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba etc which have already completed people’s democratic revolution are generally equated with the erstwhile Soviet Union and termed as socialist countries. So far as my knowledge goes, it is only the USSR which had completed the socialist revolution and became the only country where there was no class exploitation and social oppression. No other country in the world could achieve this as yet. I think my presumption is correct. If so, is it correct to club all these countries together and term them, even loosely, as socialist countries? Sunil baran Chakraborty, Bidhannagar, Kolkata A. It is true that the Soviet Union was the first country to accomplish a socialist revolution. But it would be incorrect to say that other countries did not make a revolution to build socialism. This takes us to the question about the conception of socialism. The Russian empire was not a full-fledged capitalist society, it had semi-feudal relations. The Soviet model was thus of eliminating both the capitalist and pre-capitalist relations of production and establishing the basis of socialism. The productive forces were State-owned and collectivisation of agriculture and industrialisation took place at breakneck speed in order to build up the Soviet economic strength in the face of imperialist encirclement and hostile actions. Since the Soviet Union was the first socialist State, it was considered for long that the Soviet model was the socialist revolutionary path to follow. But experience showed that road to socialism cannot be a uniform one. The experience of China, Cuba and Vietnam confirm this. The first socialist outpost in the Western hemisphere was Cuba. Cuba made tremendous strides in establishing a new society which has the best educational and health system, ended racism and established a greater degree of gender equality. It will be erroneous, not to consider Cuba a socialist country by seeking to apply “Soviet” standards to it. We must also discard a schematic understanding of how socialism develops. It is a protracted process. After all it was Lenin who said after the Russian revolution in 1917, “We have only just taken the first steps towards shaking off capitalism altogether and beginning the transition to socialism. We do not know and we cannot know how many stages of transition to socialism there will be”.