"In sum, the advance of education and industrialization necessary to meet Russia’s global ambitions weakened tsarism’s hold on the country. Such factors help explain why the Communist revolution that, according to Marx, was bound to break out in the industrialized West in fact broke out in the agrarian East. Russia lacked the deterrents to social revolution present in the West: respect for law and property, along with a sense of allegiance to a state that protected liberty and provided social services. The Russian radical intelligentsia, permeated with utopian idealism, on the one hand, and a peasantry bent on seizing private land, on the other, created a state of permanent tension liable to explode any time the central government found itself in trouble. None of the economic imperatives posited by Marx and Engels played here any role."
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Richard Pipes, Communism: A History (2003)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Russian_Revolution
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Russian Revolution
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