If the German revolution had saved Russia from isolation, the 20th century would have taken a completely different course. That view of history was a very useful "heuristic device" to avoid all the pitfalls of Social Democracy, Stalinism, Maoism, and Third Worldism. To live within that tradition, whether as a Trotskyist, a Third Camper, or an ultra-leftist, is to measure history from the vantage point of the German and Russian soviets of 1917-1921. It is not at all a bad benchmark for historical judgment; it is certainly superior to the Keynesian welfare state, the Stalinist successes in the first Five Year Plan, or labor-intensive agrarian communes in China as a notion of socialist society. But it leads to an impasse. It leads one to viewing history as a strategist for the Comintern in 1920, of taking up where the Central and Eastern European revolutions against the Hohenzollems, Hapsburgs and Romanovs left off. Yet an historical chasm separates those revolutions, and their dual character, from the present. (34) The dual nature of the October revolution was that of a revolution in which historical tasks of the bourgeois revolution were realized under the leadership of the working class, after which the proletarian political content was completely snuffed out by Stalinist counter-revolution. To draw the line of "continuity" uncritically through Lenin and Trotsky, as the exact extensions of Marx in the early twentieth century, to make the Russian Revolution the touchstone of the 20th century ("the turning point of history where history failed to turn", as someone put it) is to "buy into" a whole view of history, before and, since 1917. It is above all to accept a mythology about German Social Democracy as a revolutionary Marxist formation prior to some date, whether 1890, or 1898, or 1914, when the SPD was taken over by "revisionism". If there is one single myth at the bottom of the outlook informed by "the best of German Social Democracy and Russian Bolshevism" which has now become problematic, it is that rose tinted view of the early SPD. It is through that view that the international left was colonized by the lenses of Aufklaerungwhich originated in the civil service of the enlightened despotic states.