Imperial Russian peasants literally ran around burning and massacring villages of minorities, lynching intellectuals, and literally worshiped the Tsar as Jesus' literal second-in-command on earth. If Lenin and the bolsheviks could turn a backwards backwater barbaric empire into a industrialized powerhouse standing equal to the western capitalists states in a generation, then thinking America is somehow unique and distinct from the Tsarist Empire and all other empires that have and do exist, then I can say nothing else than you are committing the same error of American Exceptionalism that Stalin denounced in 1929.