Let’s step back and contextualize. The Russian Revolution, for all its flaws and tragic outcomes, was not a singular, isolated event floating in a vacuum of historical inevitability. It emerged out of unimaginable conditions: the ruins of Tsarist autocracy, a regime that was arguably one of the most backwards and repressive in Europe, compounded by the catastrophic toll of World War I, which had already thrown the region back decades in terms of development. The Bolsheviks inherited a situation of near-total collapse: famine, mass illiteracy, civil war, and an international blockade that strangled the new state at its infancy. To blame the USSR’s trajectory solely on Bolshevism or communism is to ignore this harrowing historical reality.

But there’s more to this story. Ask yourself why we don’t have multiple socialist success stories from the early 20th century. Why does history offer us no alternative points of reference? Let us turn to Germany, Austria, Italy, or Poland, where proletarian revolutions flickered between 1918 and 1924. The harsh truth is that the social democrats of the time, ideological forebears of today’s reformists, drowned these revolutions in blood. In Germany, the SPD actively collaborated with the Freikorps—proto-fascists, no less—to crush revolutionary uprisings like those of the Spartacists. The betrayal in Poland was no less devastating: under the leadership of a reactionary regime tied to German imperialism, Poland waged war against the fledgling Soviet state, attempting to reimpose the draconian terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

These betrayals left the Soviet Union in complete isolation, surrounded by hostile capitalist powers eager for its destruction. Without the support of an international revolution, the USSR faced an impossible dilemma: build socialism in one country or perish. The resulting “Stalinist caricature” of socialism was as much a product of this isolation as it was of internal contradictions.

From the ashes of Tsarist oppression, the Soviet Union undertook a massive and unprecedented experiment in societal transformation. This was no small feat. Lenin himself repeatedly warned of the dangers of bureaucratization and made efforts to curtail the growth of the party and state apparatus. However, his health declined rapidly after 1922, and contrary to the reactionary trope of Lenin as a dictator, his influence waned with his incapacitation. By the time Stalin rose to power, the bureaucracy had grown into a powerful force that would shape the course of Soviet history.

Nonetheless, for nearly a decade, the USSR remained one of the most progressive societies in the world, even under unimaginably difficult circumstances. Consider this: while half of the so-called “land of the free” still languished under Jim Crow apartheid, the Soviet Union was rapidly urbanizing, eradicating illiteracy, and introducing women’s suffrage and workers’ rights in ways that were unprecedented for the time. This was a country transitioning from a predominantly peasant society to an industrial power in record time.

Yes, concessions were made to private property owners. Yes, the Stalinist obsession with quantity over quality—manifested in the chaotic implementation of the Five-Year Plans—led to inefficiencies and waste. But here’s the rub: even with its deformations, the Soviet economy achieved staggering feats. It not only survived but outpaced many capitalist economies during the Great Depression. By the late 1930s, it had transformed a feudal backwater into an industrialized powerhouse capable of withstanding and defeating the Wehrmacht, the most formidable military machine of its time. And this was after enduring one of the most devastating invasions in human history.

And let’s not ignore the strides made in education, healthcare, and gender equality. The USSR turned an overwhelmingly illiterate population into one of the most educated in the world. Women gained access to professions and education in ways that far outpaced their counterparts in the West. And while Stalin’s purges and bureaucratic authoritarianism gutted much of the early revolutionary spirit, the foundations laid by the October Revolution persisted in remarkable ways. Even amid the Stalinist counterrevolution, the USSR managed to rebuild itself at an astonishing rate after the destruction of World War II, without relying on the Marshall Plan.

In conclusion, the failure of the USSR was not an inherent failure of socialism but a tragedy born of historical contingency: isolation, betrayal, and the crushing weight of imperialist opposition. The same forces that scoff at the USSR today—bourgeois ideologues and their reformist allies—bear responsibility for sabotaging the international revolutions that might have prevented the Stalinist degeneration. To use the USSR as a strawman against socialism is intellectually lazy and historically dishonest. The real question isn’t whether the USSR “worked out” but whether the world’s workers were ever given a fair chance to build a socialist alternative in the first place. The answer, dear reformist, is no—because your ideological ancestors made damn sure of it.