LogFAQs > #900283639

What is "real communism"? Marx never offered much detail about it: most of his work is a critique of the short-comings of capitalism, but he was certain only an advanced industrial capitalist society could transition into it.
Lenin thought a primarily agrarian society could gloss over the industrial stage and go straight to communism. Whether he was right or wrong, he constructed a fairly authoritarian state upon the foundation of grass-roots Soviets(the extent to which he was forced to do so by the civil war is an open question). Nevertheless, it was seized by Stalin(one of his trusted lieutenants) and transformed into a totalitarian hell-scape from which little of use can be learned(it was and is already obvious totalitarianism is horrible).
Nonetheless, Soviet Russia became the prototype upon which others(Mao, Castro, Ho Chih Minh, etc.) based their own communist states.