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.
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.
