this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2025
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Nobody in their right mind would claim USSR had achieved communism. It did achieve socialism to some extent.
USSR was ruled by a communist party, i.e. a party striving to achieve communism. Lenin postulated that in order to achieve communism (stateless, classless, moneyless society), first one has to achieve world-wide socialism (worker ownership on means of production via a state-managed centralized economy), and then transition by withering away the state. Stalin reduced the ambition to just "socialism in a single country", with the goal of eventually achieving communism at some later date. This was the prevalent ideology of CPSU until the dissolution.
Based on what? USSR had many great technical achievements, and the industrial base was pretty good at the time too. Planned economy tended to not focus on consumer stuff (which was a mistake in some ways), but industrial&military production was on par with the west if not better.
Stalin himself did not do this, materialism made the CPSU realize this after Lenin's death. When Lenin died, there was big debate in the party about whether socialism in one country should be pursued first, and the party as a whole, seeing how they had been invaded by over 10 nations during the civil war for the unforgivable sin of being communists, realized that they needed to first focus on industrializing the country in order to resist further onslaughts by capitalist forces in the future.
Trotsky was opposed to this and represented the opposition to Stalin's socialism in one country, but ultimately the party as a whole opted for socialism in one country, not because Stalin somehow lied to everyone and took dictator powers, but because it was the most logical thing. The USSR proceeded with the plans for rapid industrialization after 1929 (when the economy had fully recovered from the civil war destruction), grew industrial production and GDP at 15% per year, and ultimately laid the foundations for the industrial might that was able to save Europe from Nazism, at the terrible cost of 25 million Soviet lives.