its funny just how much the ussr diverged from marx's actual vision of how his stateless utopia would emerge.
marx said socialism would emerge in advanced industrial economies, but the ussr and china were overwhelmingly agrarian.
dont quote me on this, but im pretty sure marx outright said a socialist revolution in a peasant society would fail or turn authoritarian because the conditions for "proletarian consciousness" wouldn’t exist. lenins “vanguard party” approach was a workaround built on the admission that russia didn't meet those criteria. that right there already puts the USSR and PRC outside marx' trajectory.