Thanks comrade. A good marxist would know that everything is propaganda.
sources would be nice
Won't be citing Wikipedia here, western Wikipedia sadly has an anti-soviet bias due to the literature available in the west as a consequence of anti-communism.
I know the coup attempt took place before October. But that doesn't point you to other possible coup attempts? You don't see a coup fail and go "oh thank god that's over" and keep doing the same, right?
Oh the good old, "Call them counter revolutionary and now it's okay to shoot them"
It's not me saying that. There were terrorist attempts on Lenin, and even some successful ones against prominent Bolsheviks.
The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries had a far bigger hand in the Febuary Revolution than the Bolsheviks, and later had their legitimacy confirmed with a free election
Yes, this is true, that's the whole point of the October Revolution. Mensheviks weren't just "another good'ol branch of socialists", the key issue here is that Mensheviks believed that for a revolution to happen, a prior capitalist phase (that Russia hadn't been through) must be a prerequisite. I don't see how forfeiting power to capital and letting it grow in private hands is the most intelligent idea for a socialist revolution. And you know what? Bolsheviks were right! You CAN establish socialism without a previous phase of capitalism. In the USSR, class relations disappeared, and the exploitation was no more.
"In this respect, through the Western lens of a dichotomy of independent unions versus company unions, they were more accurately comparable to company unions, as "unlike unions in the West, the Soviet variety do not fight for the economic interests of the workers. They are conveyor belts for Party instructions, carrying punishments and rewards to industrial and collective farm employees. Soviet trade unions work with their employer, the government, and not against it."
Again, great job citing Wikipedia, which cites itself an English/American author from 1985, not at all suspected of having an ideology of themselves right? If you want sources, you can read Pat Sloan's "Soviet Democracy", a 1939 book written by Pat Sloan, an Englishman who went to the USSR to work for some years and retold an account of the functioning of the system, including unions. Spoiler alert: unions did represent the workers and, among other things, they were responsible for such important things as the access to healthcare and housing for many of the workers. Saying that they were conveyors for instructions from the top down is nonsensical, especially seeing how union membership amounted to tens of millions of workers while being totally voluntary.
While the soviets did eventually institute some rather progressive welfare reforms for their time
"Eventually"? Really? Again, you're just spouting anti-communist propaganda. You can complain about repression but saying that the USSR "eventually" instituted progressive welfare is crazy, it's one of the earliest things the USSR did. The fact that healthcare and education are extremely important is absolutely not a matter of discussion for any socialist, and that you would say "had no popular demand from the working class" is insane.
I believe most Leninists would call this a Bourgeoisie Concession had it happened in a capitalist country.
You can be as smug as you want about it, but in a classless state there are no "concessions". There's no exploitation, so there's nothing to concede.
The Bolsheviks only faced an allied invasion after having pulled out of the war and signed a separate peace with the Germans through Brest-Litovsk
Damn Bolsheviks, signing peace treaties and pulling their country out of war... So evil!
The Tsarists had almost zero power
So little power that they could kickstart a 2-year-long civil war in which many Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries joined them, and in which more than a million and a half people died on the Bolshevik side. I'm sure independent unions controlling the industry separately would have fought much better against the White armies.
and it would've stayed that way had the Bolsheviks not fractured the Russian socialist movement.
Blaming the russian civil war on Bolsheviks instead of the actual, literal monarchic fascists that wanted to restore the Russian Empire. God, I don't know how people like you can self-declare as leftists.
I actually have far more of a problem with Stalins actions in the 1920s before the Great Purge and World War 2. Between Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Ryhzkov, and their supporters, Stalin had effectively crushed any opposition even within the party. Not though discrediting them intellectually or by testing their ideas and showing the failures, but instead by killing or imprisoning them.
I also have problems with this repression because, surprise surprise, people can have nuance about the USSR and its past and history beyond "Lenin bad". I'm fully aware of the repression against Trotskyism and the oppressive descent of the USSR in Stalinist times. What you anti-communists refuse to do is to analyze the material conditions of the moment. We're talking of the first Socialist experiment ever. They didn't know what they'd encounter, they only experienced war, initially military but later also economically, against their surrounding countries, for the sake of daring to be socialists. They had lived through tsarist repression and murder, and just come out of a brutal WW1 and an equally brutal civil war. If you think it's possible to have a revolution without excesses and mistakes, you're sorely mistaken. That doesn't discredit the entire revolution, its ideals, and its achievements, at least it doesn't to me, whereas it clearly does for anti-communists like you.
I thoroughly believe these conflicts during the 1920s were what doomed the USSR, Stalin had killed almost all competing ideas for a potentially better Socialism, even among fellow Leninists.
Again, these things don't happen in a vacuum. There is a need for varying degrees of centralization depending on the material conditions. I ultimately agree that there was way too much power in the higher spheres of the USSR, which ironically led to the demise of the country once the higher ups decided it was time to "liberalize" the economy and the politics, aka Glasnost and Perestroika. But refusing to do material analysis of the circumstances, and reducing everything to "Lenin bad", is counterproductive.
Without giving a context to everything that happened in the USSR, it's very easy to judge the mistakes, but believing that "Lenin was bad and we'd do better nowadays" is delusional and shows a poor understanding of the underlying reasons, which when our revolution comes, will come to haunt us in the form of excessive and disorganized repression because of the lack of a plan for it, or as I said, even worse, a failure of the revolution as happened in my home country, Spain. Spain, during the time of the second republic, had a leftist government composed of a coalition of socialdemocrats, communists and anarchists. They were implementing land reforms according to the will of the majority, but because of the resistance of landowners and capitalists, this didn't go smoothly. Instead of applying repression against reactionary elements, and a vanguard party taking control of a revolution, what happened is that the fascists attempted a coup that plunged the country into a bloody civil war that tore the country apart, and ultimately implemented nation-wide fascism for almost four decades. Funnily enough, nobody on the left talks or complains about the excesses of violence carried out by the antifascist side during the civil war, such as burning churches with priests alive inside, or raping nuns, or execution of fascist prisoners, or even infighting among the leftist parties. You know why? Because it failed, and failed leftist movements aren't criticised but idealised by people like you. Only successful attempts of socialism deserve the ruthless public scrutiny that you guys apply. And scrutiny they deserve, but not without material and historical context that again, you guys so often forget about.
That is what I tried to do here, and is why I'm majoring in Soviet history
Can I ask where you're majoring in Soviet history? I'm interested.
imagine how much could've changed had after the civil war the Factions ban been lifted and the working class was allowed to choose between the Workers Opposition, Left Opposition or Right Opposition in free and fair internal Party elections like takes place now in most modern Socialist parties. I'm sure in this scenario Stalin wouldn't of been able to commit the atrocities he later did, and that Soviet politics would rely much more on the will of the working class than behind the curtain political maneuvering.
We can imagine the ideal utopian past where all humans were perfect and excesses weren't committed, and repression was applied just in the right manner and only on fascist elements. We can also imagine an ideal utopian past where the working class got exactly what they wanted after the revolution and nothing else, where land reform was carried out in the Menshevik way, where consumer goods were prioritized instead of the heavy industry, and where, as a consequence of the lack of heavy industry, a socialist peasant country was absolutely demolished by Nazi Germany and subjected to a holocaust. I would also love to imagine a Spain where there had been Bolsheviks and we had had some Bolshevik oppression for some years instead of 36 years of fascism.