In the twentieth century, the autocratic world was no more unified than it is today. Communists and fascists went to war with each other. Sometimes communists fought communists too. But they did have common views about the political system that Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, referred to sneeringly as “bourgeois democracy,” which he called “restricted, truncated, false, and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor.” “Pure democracy” he wrote, was “the mendacious phrase of a liberal who wants to fool the workers.” As the leader of
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