Serious question: Could the USSR have been a success ?

[steve2470]

By success, I mean in the area of human rights, economic justice,democracy, etc.... Or was it doomed to failure from the very start ?

[newscott]

1. I'm not a major expert on Russian history or anything

But it seems that once Lenin ceded control to Stalin, the whole thing was doomed. What Trotsky had in mind died very quickly.

[AngryAmish]

2. Lenin sent lots of folks into the gulag

Whole enterprise was doomed from the start.

[steve2470]

3. food for thought

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Soviet_Union
<snip>
The Bolsheviks, later the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), initially enjoyed only a tenuous, precarious hold on power. They were also divided among their own party rank and file on tactics and some policy issues. Despite these problems, they quickly consolidated their hold on state power over progressively larger portions of the country, and enacted laws prohibiting any effective rival political party under the banner of "democratic centralism."
<snip>

Wasn't this democratic centralism the kiss of death for the USSR ?

[Deja Q]

4. Depends. Many societal templates can work. It's those who are

in power that determine if it works.

And, eventually, someone greedy and vile with charisma will waltz in and destroy everything.

US ain't the first.

Nor was the USSR.

[NNadir]

5. Any system that is monolithic is doomed to ultimate failure.

Now that we live a one party state, we're about to learn that: In spades.

[StClone]

6. It was doomed with or without Reagan

For an altogether different reasons than political/economic. The country had no specific national identity. What it had was a captured and coerced independent regions that were subjugated but not assimilated and many in open hostility towards each other and the USSR. Eventually the place would have come apart even in the best of times.

[LoZoccolo]

7. No. It was a vanguardist revolution.

Left-wing type-A's. People who think a small party of people should take control of starting a revolution for everyone else. Materially no different from fascism as far as I can see, and a big part of why the left - radical, liberal, or moderate - has little credibility with people it should have credibility with in the USA.

[leftofthedial]

8. had they followed socialism instead of state capitalism

(Communism)

they'd have had a shot

[Historic NY]

9. Not w/o purges.....anyone with too much power got the boot....you know

they might have had something with that...

[hfojvt]

10. I think you need to remember

that the USSR was invaded at least twice. It was created at the end of WWI and then was invaded by the west again after its creation. So it was burdened by the paranoid necessity to build up its defenses. Its energy was going to guns instead of butter. Then Britain and the rest of the west were only too happy to encourage a war between Hitler and Stalin. Something like 20,000,000 Soviets were killed in that war and cities and factories and homes and farms destroyed.
In fact, you could argue that without Stalin's big push for industrializing from 1920-1939 that the Blitzkrieg would have rolled over the USSR like it rolled over France.
Then there was the burden of the cold war. Did the USSR need to keep pace with American "defense" spending? What would have happened if they had not?
For all of its failings and oppression, it was a fairly egalitarian society with good schools and social security. Now the world's other superpower might as well be Chile after Allende, ruled by a right wing junta which is no more democratic than Khrushchev.