LENIN, STALIN, MAO: THE BLUEPRINTS AND THE BUILDINGS

 LENIN, STALIN, MAO: THE BLUEPRINTS AND THE BUILDINGS

Picture this: Karl Marx draws up a set of plans for a house. Spacious, airy, no landlord. Everyone’s supposed to share the kitchen. Then along comes Vladimir Lenin in 1917. He looks at the plans, looks at Russia — mostly peasants, barely any working class to speak of — and says: “Fine. We’ll build the house anyway. We’ll just skip a few steps.” The result is a hurried structure with scaffolding still attached: civil war, a one-party state, and a secret police in the basement.

Then Joseph Stalin takes over. He doesn’t just change the furniture. He walls off the rooms, installs locks on every door, and builds a watchtower out back. Marx said the state would wither away. Stalin makes the state so big it swallows you whole. He forces industrialization at breakneck speed, and while he calls it socialism, the workers are no more in charge than under the tsars. Was he a true socialist? Well, if socialism meant worker control, then no. If it meant centralizing the economy under one authority… he certainly did that.

Now cross the world to China. Mao Zedong faces a different blueprint problem. Marx assumed industrial workers would rise up. China barely had any. So Mao rewrites the script: it’s peasants, not factory workers, who drive the revolution. He preaches permanent upheaval — the Cultural Revolution, endless purges — because stability, he fears, leads to rot. Critics say that makes him less a communist, more a nationalist populist in red clothing. His defenders say he sinified Marxism, made it Chinese. Either way, the results? Catastrophic famine, fractured society, and a system that used “communism” more as branding than as economic reality.

So here’s the joke history plays: all three claimed to be carrying the banner of Marx. Lenin improvised, Stalin enforced, Mao improvised and enforced. And every time the gap between theory and power widened. You might say none of them were “true” to the text. Or you might say this was the true outcome of trying to translate a 19th-century German philosopher into 20th-century geopolitics: the ideal turned into whatever worked for survival, and for those who wanted to stay in charge.

Because in the end, Marx’s house never got built the way the plans intended. Instead, you got a series of improvised extensions — leaky roofs, locked doors, and plenty of neighbors staring over the fence saying, “That doesn’t look like socialism at all.”

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