The Rise of Communism in Russia "Unless we accept the claim that LeninŐs coup dՎtat gave birth to an entirely new state, and indeed to a new era in the history of mankind, we must recognize in todayŐs Soviet Union the old empire of the Russians -- the only empire that survived into the mid 1980's" (Luttwak, 1). In their Communist Manifesto of 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels applied the term communism to a final stage of socialism in which all class differences would disappear and humankind would live in harmony. Marx and Engels claimed to have discovered a scientific approach to socialism based