Bhaskar Sunkara

They were the leading member of government.

Then a few different coalition partners would shift.

Sometimes they were with the agrarians.

Sometimes they were with the communists briefly, but they ruled uninterrupted and they lost an election in 1976 and they just left power.

Then they got back into power in the 80s.

So in other words, like,

They created a democratic system, of course, with mass support of working class people.

Then they truly honored the system because when they lost power, they lost power.

They left power.

There's plenty of cases like that across Europe and the world and in other countries like Korea and elsewhere where the workers' movements, the most militant, the most class-centric workers, South Africa is the same way, created democratic systems.

Now, Russia, I think a lot of what happened had to do with the fact that it was never a democratic country.

It was ruled by a party.

And the party itself was very easy to shift from a somewhat democratic party in Lenin's day to an authoritarian one in Russia.

And there was no distinction then between the party and the state.

So your authoritarian party changed.

then became authoritarian total control over the entirety of the state.

Now, the fact that the Soviet system involved total state ownership of production meant that the authoritarianism of the party state could go even deeper into the lives of ordinary people compared to other horrific

dictatorships like Pinochet's Chile and so on, when maybe you could find some solace just at home or whatever else.

You didn't have the same sort of totalitarian control of people's lives.

But I would say that socialism itself has yielded different outcomes.