On 30 April 1945, the day Hitler shot himself, two Soviet planes landed on a makeshift runway, a few miles from Berlin. On board, Walter Ulbricht and nine other German communists. With the fires of war still burning, they got to work, enacting the plan they’d hatched in Moscow. Underpinning it were two principles: because of the hatred of Russia in Germany, they would never talk openly of their time in Moscow. Second, they wouldn’t refer to themselves as communists. From now on, they would be known as socialists.

As Ulbricht put it: ‘It has to look democratic, but we have to hold everything in our hands.’

In 1848, Marx wrote that communism was the inevitable successor to capitalism.