I've done my three posts, so will 'er stfu after one more today.
Carrol, if you read any of the four (and many, many more I could grab from my bookshelves and memory) neo-marxist texts critiquing the fSU, that I cited to CB the other day after my temper tantrum, you'd see that none are in the vein of, "Oh that eeeeeeevil Stalin, w/o him it would have been, in the words of an old French Communist Party song, in the USSR, "the tomorrows that sing." I rely on structuralist explanations, briefly (and not exhaustive) not an I guess methodological individualism, that looks at the extreme underdevelopment of the productive forces in the early USSR, the destruction of the Civil War, the numerical and ideological underdevelopment of the Russian proletariat, the lack of political democracy pre-seizure of power in '17 (and, the essential gutting of the Soviets i.e. working class organs of power, by the late 20's)
All this any more in other texts like Bettelheim's, "Class Struggles in the USSR, " (Monthly Review Press did the first two vols. translation, an Indian press I see did vols. 3 and 4 recently), Il Manifesto (the Italian communist group to the left of the old PCI) held a conference in the late 70's with folks from Althusser, Daniel Singer, Meszaros, K.S. Karol (who has written great books on the Cuban revo. and the GPCR), Fernando Claudin, Spanish communist (see his great two vol. "The Communist Movement, " Monthly Review Press published in the 70's, as well as, "Stalin and the European Communists, "Paulo Spriono, Verso.), other sapeakers at the Il Manifesto conference, "Power and Opposition in post-revolutionary societies, " published by the UK Trotskyist Press, InkLinks, Lucio Magri, Jiri Pelikan, (Czech reform communist), Carlos Franqui, Cuban comrade of Fidel in the M-26 days, editor of Revolution the avant-garde 60's art review...