Opinion
Letting Russia burn
Karl Marx once wrote that theory becomes a material force the moment it grips the masses. Soviet leaders took that line and ran with it — straight into catastrophe — again and again. Vladimir Lenin turned it into a rationale for revolution, while Joseph Stalin used it as a license to starve and work millions of people to death in pursuit of rapid industrialization and a “bright future” that never arrived. Nikita Khrushchev, for his part, invoked it to legitimize de-Stalinization in 1956, as tho
