Mezentine said: So here's actually a great example of the sort of thing I genuinely want to know more about: why is there so much reverence for the Russian revolution and the USSR? At least based on what I've learned so far it...didn't exactly work, insomuch as the socialist and communist systems that emerged from it aren't ones we particularly want to replicate, even setting aside the Stalinist era. My view of the entire rise and fall of the USSR is that there's a lot of very important lessons to be learned about organizational traps and dangerous tendencies within political structures Click to expand... Click to shrink...

Depends on the person. I personally am not a big fan - I just like the memes - but I see the USSR as a grand failed project. I don't believe in Great Man theory; I don't believe the USSR was the living embodiment of the wills of Lenin and Stalin or whatever. It was an attempted democratic project of millions of people that failed due to the material conditions it evolved within. The democratic part got jettisoned pretty early, but even within the society that emerged there were still some elements of it that survived - for example, those 99% voting counts? Those actually happened, because the government was obsessed with showing its legitimacy, and the people knew that. They couldn't really freely pick who was on the ballot but they could abstain, or better yet threaten to abstain, which caused party members who had to organize the vote massive headaches which the people used to their advantage to get various local issues addressed. Quite clever.The USSR helped fund anti-racist, anti-imperial, and anti-capitalist movements all over the globe. It made great strides in science. It provided for its people pretty well once they got through the initial horrors considering it wasn't following market logic. At the same time the civil war was horrendous, Stalin was a monster, and the subsequent leaders were pretty bog standard authoritarians, but no worse than what modern China does.I guess I see it as a society striving to build itself according to new and higher principles that just kept subverting itself while also being sabotaged from the outside. There's a lot to take pride in and a lot to feel shame about. Not too different from the US.One perspective I read that I liked was that after the revolution, the massacres, the famine, the show trials, and especially World War II the Soviet people felt that they had emerged from the crucible and, having survived, deserved their right to seek a new world. I'm just sad they failed to do it. But I'm still proud of the ones who genuinely tried.