To add onto this, I really like Losurdo’s analysis:
Immediately after World War I — after the defeat of Tsarist Russia — Russia was in danger of being balkanized, of becoming a colony. Here I quote Stalin, who said that the West saw Russia like they saw Central Africa, that they were trying to drag it into war for the sake of Western capitalism and imperialism.
The end of the Cold War, with the West and the United States triumphant, once again put Russia at risk of becoming a colony. Massive privatization was not only a betrayal of the working classes of the Soviet Union and Russia, it was also a betrayal of the Russian nation itself. The West was trying to take over Russia’s massive energy deposits, and the US came very close to acquiring them. Here Yeltsin played the role of “great champion” for the Western colonization effort. Putin is not a communist, that much is clear, but he wants to stop this colonization, and seeks to reassert Russian power over its energy resources.
Therefore, in this context, we can speak of a struggle against a new colonial counter-revolution. We can speak of a struggle between the imperialist and colonialist powers — principally the United States — on the one side, and on the other we have China and the third world. Russia is an integral part of this greater third world, because it was in danger of becoming a colony of the West.
Plekhanov deals with this topic and many closely related issues is his On the Role of the Individual in History (1898) essay. I would recommend you read this in its entirety first.
This is not the ML dialectical materialist view. If you’re interested in exploring the relationship of masses and elites, which you’ve probably observed only in the reactionary West, I would recommend this essay from Roderic Day: Masses, Elites, and Rebels. When you read past revolutionaries like Lenin praising the proletariat for being revolutionary and holding the correct ideas, that’s not them sucking up to them, it’s a real description of a revolutionary proletariat in a revolutionary time lead by a communist party. Also, this short text by Stalin covers a very brief overview of the dialectical nature of these relationships.
Maybe you would also be interested in Gramsci’s writings about intellectuals and political parties from his Prison Notebooks, or dialectical materialist philosophy in general.
Some recommendations: there are more good essays on the topic on Red Sails, In Defense of Materialism - Plekhanov, The Dialectics of Nature - Engels, The Dialectical Biologist - Lewins and Levontin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism - Lenin