Homeostasis of Human Society
So I was thinking about Russia, right, and between Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, and modern Capitalist 'Democracy' Russia, you have three wildly different governmental structures and ideologies, but somehow they all seem more like each other than they do like anything else, implying some kind of homeostatic mechanism that keeps a society more or less in equilibrium even as you poke at it, for better or worse.
If you read Lenin's "State and the Revolution" (1917) it's quite clear that the dictatorship has been the plan from the very beginning, and it was quite extensively supported by quotes from Marx and Engels.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch01.htm#s4
A very interesting account also comes from Bertrand Russell who visited RSFSR in 1920 and then published a book that was very pessimistic on where it's all heading:
www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17350
Surely, the plan was for the dictatorship to be temporary but since the criteria for its existence were vague, the very same quotes from Marx and Engels were used by Stalin some 20 years later.
In 1917 the United States hadn't even had a fraction of the power they had after WW2. And while Western countries certainly weren't friendly towards Bolshevik, it's hard to imagine anyone being friendly towards a country that starts with an armed putsch and Red Terror, and then promises everyone else in the world the same, and then for decades actually incites "revolutionary terrorism" in neighbour countries and everywhere else.
So while the "USSR only collapsed due to Western conspiracy" argument became quite popular since 2010 revival of Russian imperialism, back in 1990 the reasons for its collapse were obvious for everyone, and especially for anyone living in Eastern Europe. The truth was that USSR foreign policy was extremely aggressive and assumed absolute supremacy of Marxist socio-economic system, even while secretly taking loans from Western countries.
