GEORGI DIM1TROV 5 full maturity in the speeches made in introducing and summing up the report and discussions at the Seventh Congress. He noted the underestimation of the fascist danger and national feelings in the past; he exploded the theory of the inevitability of fascism. While correctly characterising the class basis of fascism as the open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital, which incidentally was so defined in the thirteenth plenum of the ECCI in December 1933, he corrected the earlier understanding by stressing that fascism brings about a qualitatively new form of state system as compared to previous bourgeois regimes. Bringing out fascism's profound anti-democratic, anti-popular and inhuman character, at the same time he refuted the erroneous abstract theories of fascism which had occupied communists in barren debate: whether all reactionary bourgeois regimes could be called fascist; whether the left-wing of the social democrats arc more dangerous than the fascists themselves; whether the New Deal of Roosevelt was a fascist measure, and so on. On the other hand, he debunked the petty-bourgeois theorists' views that fascism is a movement of the petty-bourgeois counter-revolution or a non-class national movement. The Seventh Congress of the C I was able to make a fruitful contribution to the understanding of the nature of fascism. One of the major reasons for this creative result, and the flesh and blood of the illuminating report, was the unremitting efforts of Dimitrov to contribute to the collective leadersllip wliich evolved a correct stand, and he was at the helm of affairs of the CI from 1935 to 1943. Success of a Leninist The key to Dimitrov5 s growing to the stature of an international communist leader and creative initiator of the anti-fascist united front, lies in his fundamental acceptance of the implications of the 1917 October Revolution and its Leninist component. In Dimitrov's generation, there were a large number of working class leaders of the old 'Marxist' type, individually talented and self-sacrificing, who fell by the wayside in Italy, Germany and other European countries because of their inability to individually or collectively grasp the historic significance of Leninism in the epoch opened up by the Russian revolution. Dimitrov did not suffer the fate of many of these pioneers because through unremitting study and organisational work within the Bulgarian social-democratic party, he could differentiate the revolutionary essence of the 'narrow socialism' then prevalent in the party ideology, discard the obsolete and integrate the Leninist component, as part and parcel of the working class movement in Bulgaria. Right from 1919 when he wrote the preface to a pamphlet by Lenin addressed "To the Workers of Europe and America", Dimitrov