Marxism is supposed to be a ‘scientific’ philosophy which can be ‘proven’ empirically. But any true Communist zealot, deny it though they may, felt it emotionally, religiously, spiritually, even if those words would have stuck in the gullet of a true believer. Lenin would most definitely have denied it. But as one of his oldest comrades, Potresov, who knew him in St Petersburg in the early 1890s during his earliest revolutionary days, said, ‘for Vladimir Ilyich Marxism was not a conviction, but a religion’. Many others made the same point, at least until the 1917 Revolution.

Victor Sebestyen, Lenin: The man, the dictator, and the master of terror, New York, 2017, p. 150