Newsflash: Russia hasn’t been communist since 1991, they (or at least their government) are in love with the rich.
Russia was never even close to starting to try to attempt communism. There was some aesthetics, but it was state capitalism economically, and dictatorship politically. Not a lot changed.
[The USSR] was state capitalism economically
That statement is not valid and I can’t understand where its decisiveness comes from. The enonomy was centrally planned, nobody respectable calls the USSR “state capitalist”
Russia was never even close to starting to try to attempt communism
IMO the urge to conclude this comes from having to reconcile two believes: First that “the USSR was evil” and secondly an interest in communism.
People affected can then either decide to denounce communism or reevaluate and deepen their knowledge of the USSR.
The latter option is often incomprehensible, so a third option is contrieved: decoupling one from the other.
I applaud you that you could uphold whatever positive view you hold of communism and instead settle for the last option rather than denouncing communism.
However the USSR obviously absolutely seriously tried to develop their country towards communism. A lot went wrong, mistakes were made even crimes committed.
But you also have to see the context of the times. The statehood is repealed in a revolution and you need to rebuild it. all the while a couple of the strongest nations on earth invade you and fund a civil war in your country also your people are poor. Then the behemoth war machine of the nazis invades. After you beat them, costing you 30 million people, the biggest power in history declares you their enemy.
A lot went extremely well compared to that: No society was ever development that quickly before and only China managed to pull this of as well. For a brief moment in the 60s life expectancy in the USSR was higher than in the US.
Wherever you stand: The USSR is something to learn from, successes and mistakes. Keeping them in the “evil” corner is just falling for propaganda.
The enonomy was centrally planned
That’s the difference between state capitalism and the regular one. In the regular capitalism, the means of production are controlled by the capital holders, by the rich few. In state capitalism the means of production are controlled by the state, but the rest stays the same, people work for money, the results of their labour gets sold on a market of some sorts, and the surplus value is gathered by the stakeholders. Corporations in state capitalism consist of natural monopolies/oligopolies, which makes the market non-free by default, which makes everything else kinda fall apart, but it doesn’t make it not capitalism, it makes it end-stage capitalism from the beginning. For the vast majority of the USSR existence that was the case.
the urge to conclude this comes
from the desire to use words by their meaning. I am not talking about why USSR was what it was, I am only talking about what it was. It wasn’t socialism, because the main characteristic of socialism is that the means of production are collectively owned by the workers, and the means of productions in USSR were owned and operated exclusively by the state which consisted on unelected elites. It wasn’t communism, the main characteristic of that is that it’s moneyless classless society that distributes the goods based on needs, and in USSR there were social classes, there was an exchange of goods and services for money, and although there was no privately owned means of production, the amount of goods a person could receive was dependent on how much work they contribute, not on how much they need.
Economically, the USSR was a form of state capitalism, and politically it was a totalitarian dictatorship. And no matter how much they said that the ultimate goal of a country is to transition to a communism (and believe me I know how much they did it, I had to endure it in school), I don’t see any moment at which it really happened.
We could argue a lot about who declared whom an enemy, what were economical implications of the most brutal war in history, and what was the reason for the inhumane treatment of the soviet citizens by their own rulers, and is it really evil to starve to death millions of people if it means that the steel production will be a bit better, and based on your comment I assume you have a lot of strong opinions about that. But ultimately that will not be a debate about the economical structure.
