Capitalist phase of development can be skipped

So this has like 12 million qualifiers but it was supposed to be in a situation where at least one of the capitalist imperial powers, if not the hegemon, would have a socialist revolution and could help a still semi-feudal peasant society skip (or at least significantly shorten) the capitalist stage of development because they could give them the necessary means of production to construct the material basis for a socialist society. Not, as is often claimed, that you could just skip from feudalism to socialism in one country on its own. Engels hints at this in the preface to the russian edition of the manifesto:

Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeaval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West? The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.

Now obviously this hypothetical never came to pass and it might not have worked anyway, since you wouldn't have had capital destroy the traditional social structures out of which you could build something resembling socialism. Instead you would likely have to have an alternative transition stage of development which would accomplish the same things but (hopefully) without the same levels of immiseration and exploitation that capitalism inflicts on a society. But it doesn't really matter now because there aren't any semi-feudal peasant societies anymore so the whole argument is moot. As was this comment.