That it most certainly did! Large, powerful socialist countries, that aren’t particularly isolationist, certainly do that. After all, Western communist parties were a lot less useless when the Comintern was a thing. And while Lenin’s predicted revolutionary wave or domino effect theory may have ended up dead in the water after the October Revolution, it’s probably true that the more places we can make socialism happen in, the easier each further revolution will be to make happen.
Yep, that’s a very good point. The USSR was a boogeyman for Western governments that created the rise of modern social democracy. Which does reduce material harm… but I’d prefer for us to do a fucking revolution already and have real socialism instead.
I’m just not entirely convinced that Russia alone would have the resources and impact that the old USSR had before Gorbachev wrecked everything. The October Revolution was a very unique and complicated set of material conditions, and the Great Patriotic War was an important factor for all parties involved. There was a lot to the Cold War that relied on the Warsaw Pact as a geopolitical reality, that a socialist modern Russia simply wouldn’t have to the same power levels.
All that said, it is truly none of our business, and it is great that they even still have a communist party at all, and that that party is even a shadow of what the CPSU was.
It’ll never be the same, but that makes me feel hopeful, funnily enough. I know that restoring the USSR isn’t a magic bullet that’ll bring back the entire 1916-23 revolutionary wave and make it actually work how Lenin predicted this time around, and I’m not even old enough to be the type of washed up old Cold War era Comintern type who thinks of the USSR as a necessary and key guiding star of global socialism that makes our movements all stronger through its own existence, and yet, I still think that reconstructing it will somehow help the Western left. Or at least make having Opinions on the Cold War a little fun and a little scary again.
I think a lot of what Western leftists miss the USSR over… is not anything that will automatically return if Russia becomes a socialist state again. And yet, I still want the USSR back anyway.
We are known for “walls of text”.
“If the USSR still existed/won the Cold War” is my absolute favourite kind of alt history. (Well, I also like hate reading/watching “if Germany won WWII” crap because it’s all so hilariously implausible.) God, that’d be the dream. If only we had gotten the Cold War good ending. I wish the USSR had won both the scientific and military tech races and the cultural dominance game. I wish I lived in a world where it was normal and commonplace across the world to celebrate the anniversary of the Great October Revolution. I wish socialism had won before I was born and the existence of capitalism was just a chapter in my primary school history textbooks.
But that didn’t happen, so we the Western Left have to learn from the Soviets’ successes and failures, and keep fighting to build socialism in our own land.
Other way around for me - got into Linux because some comrades were saying real commies use it, I was really mad at Windows that day to begin with, and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try it out. Found out it’s… sucky in different ways, but in ways that frustrate me less and where I tend to be angry at myself for screwing something up rather than angry at a corporation for being hostile to its customers, which is something I’m angry about far too often as it is.
Tbf, if you’re good at that and getting paid decently for it, it probably wouldn’t suck that bad. There’s definitely people out there who enjoy fixing/rewriting broken code. Fixing broken stuff is a real thrill for some folks.
But it does suck that programmers good at other areas of programming, who prefer working on stuff that already works or coding new things from scratch, will end up being expected instead to fix chatbot slop.
And you only even try to set up #1 after #2 causes a catastrophic data loss, or costs you five times as much wasted time finding a file that’s causing problems.
Ooh, reminds me of one of my favourite catchphrases. “The biggest lie you were ever told about the Cold War, is that the American people won, not just the global bourgeoisie.”