CAUSA MORTIS: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Karl Marx

The so-called 'communist' movement from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not die gradually as it may be deduced by a superficial analyst. It died in that exact moment at which Marxist-Leninist intellectuals embraced the idea that, because it was "scientific", marxism dispensed with ethics.
That was the turning point which triggered the search for a 'dialectical synthesis' between the holiness of Francis of Assisi and Machiavelli's pragmatism. The result was the emergence of incredibly peculiar leaders, "mankind saviours": great murderers, well-intentioned genocidaires like Stalin, Mao, and others.