> Similarly, the Soviet Union initially instructed the Chinese Communist Party to cooperate with the KMT in the 1920s, because they believed that full development of productive forces, under a capitalist regime, was a necessary precursor to communism. Not helpful, or merely good to have, but necessary according to Marx's dialectical philosophy.

Yes. The irony of course is that prior to Lenin arriving at the Finland Station and publishing the April Theses, Marxists in Europe, Marxists in Russia, and even the leading cadre of the Bolsheviks expected the same thing in Russia - that Lenin would support the provisional government formed by the February revolution. The Russians advised the Chinese CP not to do what they did. Of course, China had even less of a proletariat than Russia. When the KMT government fled to Taiwan in December 1949, only one ambassador left with them instead of remaining on the mainland - the Soviet Union's.

> Maybe Deng was disingenuous and tried to sneak capitalism in through the back door, or maybe he really did believe what he said. But you can't dismiss his views as being non-Marxist ipso facto, because they are clearly derived from Marx's theory of history and expressed via Marxist concepts.

Right. Lenin wrote a rebuttal to what he called infantile left wing communists in 1920, which was before the NEP when they really started saying capitalism had been restored in Russia. Stalin disbanded the Comintern and spoke of socialism in one country. Khrushchev was called a revisionist by Mao and Hoxha, and he switched a lot of capital production over to production of consumer goods. Actually people were probably right, because that really was the beginning of the end of the Russian (and Eastern European) economy which had been growing like gangbusters prior to that.