Communism developed in Russia and China not because of factors unique to the social and economic situations in these two countries and because of the charismatic leadership of each country's respective communist leaders, namely Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong. Karl Marx, who founded communism as ideology in 1848 said the necessary factors for its practical implementation were an elite class who controlled industry and large populations of workers, factors that all major European countries shared by the twentieth century, and which applied to China by the star of World War II, when communism took hold there