Beg the question: Evade the issue

But many stacked turtles lie hidden beneath communism. To attribute contemporary authoritarianism simply to twentieth-century politics begs the question of why communism triumphed so thoroughly in Russia in the first place, as it did in China. There was, of course, a much older absolutist tradition at play. Russia prior to the Bolshevik Revolution had developed a strongly centralised state, in which executive power was only weakly constrained by either rule of law or accountable legislature.

Francis Fukuyama