Your liberal idealism mistakes imperialist coercion for “choice” and bourgeois metrics for human progress. The USSR lifted semi-feudal societies to industrial superpower status, defeated fascism, and guaranteed work, housing, and education as right ,not commodities. Contradictions like bureaucracy or Lysenkoism were real, but Marxist-Leninists criticize these as deviations under imperialist siege, not proof of socialism’s failure. The “thriving” of post-Soviet states is measured in GDP for oligarchs and EU core capital, not working-class wellbeing: deindustrialization, demographic collapse, and dependent peripheral status followed the “shock therapy” you praise. Ceaușescu’s lavishness was denounced by Marxists as a betrayal of socialist principle, not its essence. Central planning, imperfect under blockade and scarcity, achieved historic gains without colonial plunder. Your argument conflates the degeneration of a besieged workers’ state with the emancipatory project itself. The lesson isn’t retreat to capital, but to advance the struggle with clearer theory and firmer proletarian democracy.