According to the memories of Clara Zetkin Lenin specifically complained about young people in the party who were reading d'Annunzio and deemed it necessary to prove everyone how much they were Nietzschean Übermenschen by being all kinky and loose.

Conservatives such as Dostoyevsky in his "demons" and Nietzsche himself in Ecce Homo had previously conflated the notions of decadent and depraved hipster "nihilists" with that of the leftwing terrorists and revolutionaries, too, but such an attitude is not as easy to justify footing alone on the writings of Engels and Marx or Plekhanov.