>But I'd love to be persuaded
>that it was still worth it, despite the outcome.
What else could they have done? They had to act in the moment, and had no way of knowing how history would turn out in 1989. In many ways it was an excellent attempt; they industrialized the USSR, brought its social indicators up to near-Western levels - and as Putin said, its collapse was a great catastrophe. Much of the fSU outside Moscow is worse off than it was 16 years ago. And what was the counterfactual? Russia wasn't developing swimmingly before the revolution. And it's not like the birth of capitalism, or even its continued existence, was all that pretty a picture. I don't often find myself saying this, but don't be so pessimistic!
Doug