Soviet Terror Was the Natural Evolution of Marx's Communism

Marx had believed that the working class had to transform their consciousness over decades through civil and national wars in order to "Become qualified for political power." For Lenin, it was the professional revolutionary, not the masses, who were central to the transformation of society.

Mises is trying to highlight that the Soviet Union was not aberrant to Marxism, but that actually existing communism took after the example Marx left his adherents.

Those who complain that the Soviet Union has betrayed Marx have in mind the intellectual theories rather than the actual behavior of Marx the man.

Since Marx held that most people were proletarians and that their class provided them with the correct ideology, a majority vote should naturally turn out the sort of policies that would serve the interest of the working class.

In The Civil War in France, Marx derides parliamentary democracy as a means of "Deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in parliament." He and Engels cautioned against the confusion of "Political emancipation with human emancipation." Democracy alone would not provide freedom in the Marxian view.

The Communist Manifesto described "The first step in the revolution" as being "To raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy," and Marx praised the United States in contrast to Russia for giving the masses more political power.

"When Marx and Engels began writing in the 1840s, voting rights for the masses were so rare that a revolution in the sense of a radical transformation and in the sense of an armed uprising were virtually synonymous." He suggests that Marx believed in the possibility of a peaceful revolution, even urging the French workers to, "Calmly and resolutely improve the opportunities of Republican liberty" because an uprising would be "Desperate folly." On the other hand, Marx was essentially certain that those who held state power and wielded it on behalf of the bourgeois would hardly allow a peaceful revolution to take place without attempting to put it down violently.

https://mises.org/wire/soviet-terror-was-natural-evolution-marxs-communism