It is ironic that the 20th century's first major experiment in socialism û the Russian Revolution û became a byword for totalitarian state terror as well as an economic basket case, and was ultimately dismantled from within. Karl Marx's vision of communism was a utopian one. He saw the urban working classes of Europe seizing power from the land-owning bourgeoisie, and through the "guidance" of the Communist Party eventually sharing all the fruits of their labor " to each according to his need and from each according to his ability" (www.answers.com). Marx clearly prescribed a "dictatorship" of the proletariat in order to seize power, but ultimately envisioned an evolution to democracy in which the masses controlled the government, although the details of how this would happen were left vague.
The situation that led to the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks commanded by Vladimir Lenin in October of 1917 was made possible by the Tsar's internal repression of the peasants (who made up 80% of the population), a disastrous economy, and especially by the strains on Russia produced by its joining World War I on the side of the Allies against Germany. Lenin withdrew from the war and consolidated Communist control of all organs of the state, only to have remnants of the Tsar's government with military and financial support from the United States and Europe rise in a bloody civil war that finally ended in 1922.
Two elements of the Soviet system that would eventually prove its undoing were already present at this time. One was the creation of the forerunner of the feared Soviet secret police known at first as the Cheka and eventually as the KGB. Thus began an internal reign of terror against perceived domestic enemies that would last until the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s, and which more than anything led to popular disaffection with Soviet-style communism.
The other policy that the communists never seemed to find a solut...