Really? The funny thing I notice about most of the people I have met from the former SU, East Bloc, and China is that they know damn little about Marx. In the case of my wife (Chinese), she was force-fed Mao (guess that's what you call popularization) and my russian colleagues seem to know damn little about Marx but they do know a little about Lenin. ----------- I write:
You had to read commentaries on Lenin, then Lenin, then Lenin on Marx, then, if you ever got that far, Marx himself. Kinda like, as far as I understand it, the Orthodox Jewish approach to reading the Bible.
I've asked people who were educated in the USSR about how the pre-Gorbachev regime reconciled the pro-democracy passages in Lenin and Marx with actual practice, and they basically answered, "They pretended they didn't exist," or "they mouthed slogans about how under real Communism, we will have them, but that will be in decades at least!" Of course that changed when Gorby started citing pro-democracy passages in Lenin and rehabilitating Bukharin.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal