the last book I ever read (Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy, excerpt three)

from Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum:

Monarchy, tyranny, oligarchy, democracy—all of these ways of organizing societies were familiar to Plato and Aristotle more than two thousand years ago. But the illiberal one-party state, now found all over the world—think of China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe—was first developed by Lenin, in Russia, starting in 1917. In the political science textbooks of the future, the Soviet Union’s founder will surely be remembered not just for his Marxist beliefs, but as the inventor of this enduring form of political organization. It is the model that many of the world’s autocrats use today.