The CPUSA never wavered in its official view (from 1936 on) that it was seeking change by peaceful electoral means. It predicted fascist dictatorship during the McCarthy period, and asserted the right of revolution in the face of fascism, but it did not take an RCP like position that violent overthrow was its strategy.
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Actually, the overwhelming majority of revolutionaries in all times and places (and not merely communist revolutionaries) has been some variation of this: not some "strategy" of violent overthrow, which always leads to the kind of sandbox politics I referred to the other day, but the prediction that violent resistance would be _forced_ on progressive forces.
I've argued before that the label "fascism" is backward-pointing and obscures _real_ threats of authoritarianism, which will take a different form than "fascism," but given that modification, I would still hold to a similar prediction to what you describe the CPUSA making at one time.
Bourgeois democracy is inherently unstable.
Carrol