In 1925, Goebbels and Strasser argued in the Nazi daily, Völkischer Beobachter, that only the introduction of a ‘socialist dictatorship’ could save G… - Richard Pipes

The party which Lenin forged and led was really not a party, in the customary sense of the word. It was more of an ‘order,’ in the sense in which Hitler called his National-Socialist Party ‘ein Orden,’ bound by the members’ unshakable loyalty to their leader and one another, but subject to no other principle and responsible to no other constituency. Genuine political parties strive to enlarge their membership, whereas these pseudo-parties—the Bolshevik one first, and the Fascist and the Nazi ones later—were exclusive in that they treated membership as a privilege, restricting it to persons who met certain ideological as well as class or racial criteria. Elements regarded as unworthy were purged.

Nothing contributed more to the emergence of private property in the West and the rights associated with ownership than the appearance in the late Middle Ages of urban communities.

Studying Russian history from the West European perspective, one also becomes conscious of the effect that the absence of feudalism had on Russia. Feudalism had created in the West networks of economic and political institutions that served the central state, once it replaced the feudal system, as a source of social support and relative stability. Russia knew no feudalism in the traditional sense of the word, since, after the emergence of the Muscovite monarchy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, all landowners were tenants-in-chief of the Crown, and subinfeudation was unknown. As a result, all power was concentrated in the Crown.