Dear Susil Gupta. Thank you for pointing to the importance of the context in which Lenin’s remarks were delivered. I posted Lenin’s article, “Trotsky Was a Thousand Times Right,” together with the two speeches that preceded it in the Communist International debate — the interventions by Bela Kun and Leon Trotsky. So a good deal of the context is actually there on my website.

However, I agree that it would be good to have more. I aim to post the preceding two speeches, by Reiland and LaPorte, this month.

You ask what was the debate all about? Surely it is clear: Lenin, like Trotsky before him, was criticizing exaggerated hopes about “the prospect of revolution in Western European states.” It was Bela Kun and his co-thinkers who deserve your adjective, “deluded.”