Robert Conquest on Karl Marx

“In the NKVD as it was now [in 1936], Stalin had a powerful and experienced instrument. At its head stood Yagoda. His deputy in security matters was Stalin's crony Agranov, who had finished his special operations at Leningrad and handed over that city to the dreadful Sakovsky, who is said to have boasted that if he had Karl Marx to interrogate he would soon make him confess that he was agent of Bismark.”

“Marxism does not have, and does not even pretend to have, any mechanism to explain the internal development of the social system it describes as "Asiatic." In these areas of traditionalist despotism, under which the larger part of the world's population lived for thousands of years, Marx quite explicitly and admittedly found no class conflict, in the absence of opposing groups categorized as economic classes. (Change only came, as he puts in, when Western culture bursts in on them: an unconscious illustration of Marx's Eurocentrism).”