Sentence:  These never ceased to suggest that if , in the eyes of Marx and Lenin `` full communism '' <WSD>was</WSD> still a very distant ideal , the establishment of a Communist society had now , under Khrushchev , become an `` immediate and tangible reality '' . 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  have the quality of being; (copula, used with an adjective or a predicate noun)