Oh, the irony! Lenin understood that Marx’s “inevitable economic determinism” wasn’t so inevitable after all, so he established an elite group of professional revoutionaries—the Vangaurd, to force history his way.

Stalin is even better at irony at the Sixteenth Party Congress of 1930 where he essentially says that a totalitarian state is the prerequisite for the “withering away of the State.” (The quote would be too long for a post.)

Let that sink in for a second.