In addition to not having them as a military rival, as far as I remember, Germany or some other industrial country having a successful revolution, and subsequent aid from that country, was taken as a given Lenin's original plans for the development of the Soviet Union after the revolution. It almost seems like the possibility of their revolution being the only successful one in Europe never really occurred to him. You can see a lot of the same optimism in pre-1918 Lenin as you can see in Marx and Engels, where they saw things going much better and on a faster time scale than what actually happened. Between the lack of allies and the foreign invasion, the original plan had to be scrapped, and a "strategic retreat" to the NEP and its reintroduction of the market became the new policy.
It's an interesting alt-history to think about, where the new USSR keeps the more state-run system it had pre-NEP, and starts developing with the aid of a friendly industrial power, and therefore the "capitalist roader" faction that eventually led to Gorbachev never gained as much influence.
In addition to not having them as a military rival, as far as I remember, Germany or some other industrial country having a successful revolution, and subsequent aid from that country, was taken as a given Lenin's original plans for the development of the Soviet Union after the revolution. It almost seems like the possibility of their revolution being the only successful one in Europe never really occurred to him. You can see a lot of the same optimism in pre-1918 Lenin as you can see in Marx and Engels, where they saw things going much better and on a faster time scale than what actually happened. Between the lack of allies and the foreign invasion, the original plan had to be scrapped, and a "strategic retreat" to the NEP and its reintroduction of the market became the new policy.
It's an interesting alt-history to think about, where the new USSR keeps the more state-run system it had pre-NEP, and starts developing with the aid of a friendly industrial power, and therefore the "capitalist roader" faction that eventually led to Gorbachev never gained as much influence.