The history of Communism as a practical movement begins with a single man:
Vladimir Ilich Lenin. The Russian Marxist movement preceded Lenin by two
decades, but it was Lenin who split off a militant faction from the rest
of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party and forged it into a potent
weapon for totalitarian revolution. Totalitarian tendencies were
veritably omnipresent in the entire Russian Marxist movement - in not only
the Leninists, or "Bolsheviks," but also in his
Menshevik opponents. As the 1903 party program
of the R.S.D.L.P. - written by Plekhanov, a Menshevik who harshly criticized
Lenin - explains,
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