Twentieth-century communism had, since the beginning, a double dimension: the revolutionary movement, on the one hand; the state power system, on the other. Both sides are inseparable. The history of communism as a revolutionary movement in world scale is intimately linked to the Russian and then Soviet history. And the Soviet system, in the final configuration stalinism gave to it, was a model to the whole communist world along many decades. So that twentieth-century communism is primordially identical with the historical experience of the Soviet power. Other brands of communism, heretical or dissident to Stalinist ortodoxy, performed a less important, often marginal, role.
Twentieth-century communism; The Soviet model; The communist revolutionary movement; The Soviet State