Russia and China: Rightward Shift Suspected as Tactical Maneuver

Russia and China: Rightward Shift Suspected as Tactical Maneuver

A theory circulating for nearly a year, gaining traction with every geopolitical shift, argues that classical communism never died—it just changed its coat. The argument is not that Russia or China are still communist—this is taken for granted—but that their apparent conversion to capitalism and right-wing stances is a tactical maneuver, not a rupture. The discussion, open during the pandemic and revisited with the Ukraine war as backdrop, posits that Moscow and Beijing are not rivals to the Western order, but part of the same board. It relies on fiscal figures, intact Soviet symbols, and a reading of Marxism-Leninism as pure power strategy.

The 12% Russian income tax that doesn't fit the communist label

The first data point cited is fiscal. The Russian income tax stands at around 12%, a rate in Spain considered right-wing and lower than that applied by the US, near 40% combining federal and state brackets. This is added to restrictive legislation on LGTBI content and a family model that, on paper, fits the European conservative voter.

The problem, according to the theory, is that none of this breaks with the Soviet past. Vladimir Pilingui comes from the KGB. Lenin's mausoleum remains in Red Square, the country's most emblematic enclave, preserved with updated funeral protocol, not as just another museum piece. May 9 remains the national holiday, with the hammer and sickle in the parades. For supporters of the analysis, this is not nostalgia: it is continuity disguised as reform.

China: Economic reforms without touching Mao's altar

Since Deng Xiaoping's reforms, China has accumulated decades of growth, becoming a leading country. But Mao Zedong remains revered as the country's great man, and the party structure has not been dismantled. In this line, the unverified figure is cited that the Chinese Communist Party has up to 2 million agents spread worldwide, with presence in Western companies and administrations.

A party member boasted in a video of being infiltrated in all Western governments while laughing, a gesture supporters of the theory take as evidence. The uncomfortable question posed is: if Chinese capitalism were real, why has it not touched the summit that designed it?

Why speak of two simultaneous revolutions?

Here, the analysis diverges from the more common version. There is not one single communism, but two paths advancing in parallel toward the same destination. One is slow and apparently harmless: Fabian socialism, that pogre drip raising a tax each legislature and rewriting history a little more with each edition. Its symbol, they recall, is a wolf disguised as a lamb. The other is fast and violent: classical Marxism-Leninism, which does not dally with theories because all that matters is seizing power.

The Spanish VAT serves as an example of the first method: from 12% to 15%, then 16%, then 18%, and today 21%. No sharp jumps, no rupture date. The wear is cumulative, like that of an organism having its ration cut each year. The theory holds that, from above, it makes no difference which of the two revolutions wins as long as the population continues to support one.

The connections cited: Soros, Oxford, and the KISZ

Supporters of the theory seek biographies that fit the pattern. The repeated case is that of Viktor Orban, Hungarian prime minister presented in Europe as a scourge of Brussels. In 1989, he received a Soros Foundation scholarship to study Political Science at Pembroke College, Oxford, under the tutelage of Hegelian philosopher Zbigniew Pełczyński. A year later, he left Oxford to run in Hungary's first post-communist elections.

At 14 and 15, he had been secretary of the KISZ communist youth organization at his high school—a mandatory activism to enroll in university, as the cited source records. For supporters of the analysis, this sequence is no coincidence: the man who today sells national sovereignty was trained in the system's nursery with the money of one of its financial architects.

Wall Street funded both sides

Economist Antony Sutton documented the financial leg of this story in his trilogy: Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, Wall Street and FDR, and Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. He argued that New York banking financed both sides of the wars to build captive markets and deactivate competitors in raw materials and energy. The same idea reappears in his trilogy on Western technology supporting Soviet development between 1917 and 1945.

This is the point where the analysis becomes hardest to refute and, at the same time, easiest to ridicule. Without internal documents, the coincidence of interests is confused with coordination, and here positions diverge.

With the Ukraine war as backdrop, tanks with the hammer and sickle on the front were read by supporters of the theory as confirmation: Russia and Ukraine, they say, are bleeding dry by order of those who move both sides. None of these claims have public documentary proof. The analysis stops exactly there, at the point where reasonable suspicion meets the absence of a paper turning it into fact.