Historical events have answered these questions in the affirmative. At this writing the Soviet Government has survived continuously for more than half a century. During that period it has transformed economically, politically and culturally backward portions of Europe and Asia into one of the most advanced areas on the planet. Monopoly capitalist society assumes that productivity, wealth and fire-power, effectively co-ordinated under competent authority, will guarantee survival and perhaps win supremacy. Beginning its life in one of the backward areas of the planet, the Soviet Union has met all of these tests by converting itself into a first class world power. Its productivity is second only to that of the United States. In wealth it stands second among the nations. Its fire power has carried the Soviet Union to victory in civil and international war. Its ruling oligarchy--the Soviet Communist Party--has maintained its authority through the stresses of domestic strife and major international conflict. In terms accepted by the existing free-for-all West, the Soviet Union is an established world power. Through the first three decades of its existence the Soviet Union was the only government avowedly engaged in building a socialist rival to monopoly capitalism and determined to replace capitalism as the dominant planet-wide social system. After 1943 it was joined by a dozen other European, Asian and American countries, dedicated like the Soviet Union to the task of building socialism. In addition to these dozen countries, several others such as India, Burma, Indonesia, Ceylon, Ghana and Libya, declared their intention of building socialism by legal, and gradual stages. Almost all of the countries busied with socialist construction were in East Europe and Asia. The countries building toward socialism were more widely scattered, but by and large they were Eurasian. From 1919 to 1943 socialist construction was directed, at least in theory, by the Communist International with headquarters in Moscow--the "general staff of the World Revolution". Under war pressure the Communist International was dissolved in 1943. No equally inclusive international socialist authority has since been established.