The USSR was bad but it wasn’t communist. For that it would have had to have been stateless and classless, definitionally.
I’m not sure it is. Like, yes, it does exist in the Left/Right, Auth/Lib political compass, but that’s just a model. The stance has some inherent contradictions.
And so does Right/Lib, for that matter. “Fiscally conservative/socially liberal” is a nonsense position, and those taking it tend to just be conservative in practice.
Is it was so great, why did most of the conquered nations run west as fast as they could as soon as they could? Must have been because the USSR was so ‘progressive’.
Progressive at first, but then sorta forgot about it.
At the start, women were given rights that suffragists in the UK or USA could only dream of. Then it stopped. By the 1960s, women in the USSR found that they were still expected to do all the same old household chores while also holding a job outside the home. Meanwhile, western feminism had developed a strong second wave, and later a third (arguably more since, but that gets complicated). Those waves dealt with increasingly abstract issues in the patriarchy, including the problem of household chores.
This simply didn’t happen in the USSR. Developing one would have required greater freedom of speech than anyone had in that country.
Tried a bunch, but tried wrong.
The Lenin model of communism is inherently flawed for one simple reason. An Authoritarian Communism is an Impossibility. It cannot exist by pure definition.
The true ideal communism is a stateless utopia.
So yeah, the Lenin model is flawed to the point of uselessness. Or worse because any authoritarian government is going to kill its own citizens, while also being a low grade threat to neighboring countries.
No. The only path to true communism is via democracy. And there are countries that are moving in that direction.
The party was meant to just be the organizer of the workers, not the ruler. The degeneration took off only after Lenin’s death and the 4th Congress of the Comintern, which was dominated by Troika. that’s why Mayakovsky was a devout Bolshevik until Stalinzation advanced and started scrapping several progressive conquests of October, leading to his suicide at the refusal to prop up the Stalinist degeneracy.
Also Lenin was, for instance, not a big fan of the many experimental artistic movements that flourished after the Revolution, but did not suppress them, unlike Stalin.
He also regretted banning other parties (but which was necessitated by every single one of them taking up arms against Sovnarkom) and before his death wanted to offer Trotsky a post of Commisar of Internal Affairs in a desperate bid to curtail the bureaucracy, but Trotsky, unfortunately, refused.
