“What is to be done?” That’s the question posed in a 1902 pamphlet by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as “Lenin,” as the young revolutionary began to flesh out his weaponization of Karl Marx’s principles of communism. It wasn’t enough, argued Lenin in typically turgid prose, to expect Russia’s nearly non-existent industrialized working class—the proletariat—to come to international Socialism on its own. Instead, he believed, the radical “Populists” who advocated the communization of the peasantry as a necessary first step were in fact advocating a form of capitalism—and that couldn’t be allowed to happen. True Socialism, said Lenin, could only be found in Marxism, and for that a strong Communist Party was needed to guide the Russian people to the correct conclusions. And so he provided one. Two decades later, Lenin was the absolute master of the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Against all odds, a true communist society …