Internationalism No. 82, December 2025 Page 6 From the series Pages from the history of the workers’ movement The role of soldiers in the German Revolution must also be considered from the perspective of the relative stability of the German State compared to the Russian one. Lenin emphasised this on several occasions: in Germany, bourgeois rule was much more firmly established than in Russia, because capitalism was more advanced and the State rested on stronger economic and social foundations. In Germany, therefore, the class party was confronted with the unprecedented task — which remains so even today — of seizing power in a mature imperialist metropolis. The German Revolution brought about the collapse of the Hohenzollern empire, but the rupture was accompanied by bourgeois forces safeguarding class dominance thanks to political forms more suited to the imperialist era. First among these forces was the Social Democratic ...