The former Soviet Union and modern Russia are basically indistinguishable economically. Both are examples of consumer-oriented economies. After Lenin's death, the USSR had an exceptional mission and opportunity, matched only by its dearth of vision amongst its bureaucrats. Trotsky was content to sit back and let their Revolution stand on its own as they waited for the rest of Marx's predicted revolutions to materialise. Despite the accuracy of Marx's assessments and predictions as a whole, his predictions missed the mark when estimating that Capital's neverending crises and the increasing concentration of industrialised workers in densely populated areas would lead workers to shared class consciousness even transcending national boundaries. This ended up being the most significant deviation between what Marx had predicted the century prior to the end of WWI, as the Revolution in Germany failed and the SPD betrayed its opportunity and constituents and instead opted for a liberal national government that would not fundamentally challenge Capital, by voting for war credits.

The Revolution actually ended up succeeding in less wealthy, agrarian societies like Russia and China, but USSR never ended up fulfilling its mission. Rather than leverage its position to establish a fundamental global conflict with capitalism, the USSR failed to adapt to the changing circumstances regarding the failure of international revolution to materialise. Instead it just became another consumer-oriented economy that would attempt to compete with the United States and capitalism on its own terms. By Marx's predictions, the Soviets just needed to wait out the Capitalists and the revolutions would be achieved with minimal effort on their part beyond aesthetics. Ultimately this proved fatal, they failed to adapt Marx's work to the situation unfolding. SPD's war credits decision and betrayal of revolutionaries led directly to the ascendency of the Nazis in Germany, and in the post-WW2 era the US was able to extract enormous wealth from the rest of the planet. This position and the extractive wealth of neocolonialism in the late 20th century until roughly the turn of the millennium allowed a degree of amelioration for the underclasses that Marx did not predict Capital would allow for its petit bourgeois.

This was a temporary sacrifice for Capital, then mostly centralised in the United States. A very narrow vision of prosperity was formulated: The generation returning from WW2 could be compensated with an automobile and a house in the suburban experiment that the US was undertaking. Each segregated into their own little single-family home kingdoms in car-dependent suburbia, this generation would become the professional class overseeing the development of Capital's new war machines, as well as the computers and algorithms for completely optimised financialization and commoditization of all aspects of life, and later for the surveillance and propagandizing of all workers globally.

Of course none of this was sustainable, but it was the easiest way to build the world's first truly global empire. The professionals who benefited from the massive federal and state subsidies that allowed infrastructure installations rivaling that of cities at the time in these low density suburbs were happy to spend their working lives developing systems of monitoring and control if it meant they could live this comfortable lifestyle, imagining themselves outside of the social fabric in their low density, federally-subsidized, car-dependent suburbs.

Eventually these places all crumble since they don't generate nearly enough tax revenue to cover the cost of maintaining the subsidized infrastructure that's been handed out to these areas on the dole. The areas that experience periods of growth are able to hide the problem by taking more subsidies to build more new, sprawling infrastructure. Since it takes a while for infrastructure to degrade to the point where it absolutely needs maintenance to function, these tax revenues from new residents can be used to repair the most visible deficiencies. In other contexts, this is known as a "Ponzi scheme," but ultimately it's not like you can break even when you're losing money on every new suburb once it needs maintenance. This is why the US is in debt, the military spending is kind of a red herring since it was largely necessary for the levels of extractive exploitation the US was able to carry out abroad, which did trickle back into at least allowing the Feds to subsidize the interest on public debts taken to repair roads and wastewater processing facilities. But the US also invested a ton into fighting "communism", by pouring investment dollars into foreign economies that seemed about to revolt. This enabled an international competition which then imploded the US' manufacturing base. Further deregulation of industry and financial markets allowed companies, now international entities, to lift and shift operations to other countries thus depriving the US of even the undersized tax base it had enjoyed.

So now the US' domestic constituency is left holding the bag for 7 decades of crumbling, sprawling, unsustainable infrastructure installations. Its urban centers were also never reinvested in, that money mostly went toward suburbs. Money spent in existing urban areas was just to make them car-dependent. Massive urban highway expansion and interchanges were integral to enabling suburban commutes. It also served to degrade and ghettoized communities adjacent to these urban highways, by bulldozing existing blocks to build them.

But all of that looked a lot better than the bare exploitation of labour by the State which was occuring in the consumer-oriented communism of the Soviet Union. Without the market system, alienation under the Soviet system was much more stark because there was nothing to mystify the workers' relationship with the means of production as there is in a society where Capital owns the means of production, the media, and orchestrates the State levers of power.

I think if you actually reflect on it, there's nothing fundamentally different about the approach taken in a national communist state like the USSR and Cuba or a capitalist state like the US. Both models attempt to satisfy consumption, but capitalists obfuscate the complexity, or lack thereof, to keep people pointing their fingers at eg minorities instead of at Capital. Without international communism, competition between an unsustainable economic model and a model of worker ownership of the means of production isn't meaningful. Capital is naturally able to filter through the chaff and select the most intelligent psychos to design its war machines. Truly international communism doesn't allow resources to be allocated so unequally as to require doomsday weaponry to defend wealth, but while competition exists (currently there are no meaningfully competitive communist states in the world so this doesn't really apply) the communists must expend those resources toward weapons of war that could be better used on absolutely anything else. But as explained, the USSR never did anything to meaningfully defeat capitalism.

The former Soviet Union and modern Russia are basically indistinguishable economically. Both are examples of consumer-oriented economies. After Lenin's death, the USSR had an exceptional mission and opportunity, matched only by its dearth of vision amongst its bureaucrats. Trotsky was content to sit back and let their Revolution stand on its own as they waited for the rest of Marx's predicted revolutions to materialise. Despite the accuracy of Marx's assessments and predictions as a whole, his predictions missed the mark when estimating that Capital's neverending crises and the increasing concentration of industrialised workers in densely populated areas would lead workers to shared class consciousness even transcending national boundaries. This ended up being the most significant deviation between what Marx had predicted the century prior to the end of WWI, as the Revolution in Germany failed and the SPD betrayed its opportunity and constituents and instead opted for a liberal national government that would not fundamentally challenge Capital, by voting for war credits.

The Revolution actually ended up succeeding in less wealthy, agrarian societies like Russia and China, but USSR never ended up fulfilling its mission. Rather than leverage its position to establish a fundamental global conflict with capitalism, the USSR failed to adapt to the changing circumstances regarding the failure of international revolution to materialise. Instead it just became another consumer-oriented economy that would attempt to compete with the United States and capitalism on its own terms. By Marx's predictions, the Soviets just needed to wait out the Capitalists and the revolutions would be achieved with minimal effort on their part beyond aesthetics. Ultimately this proved fatal, they failed to adapt Marx's work to the situation unfolding. SPD's war credits decision and betrayal of revolutionaries led directly to the ascendency of the Nazis in Germany, and in the post-WW2 era the US was able to extract enormous wealth from the rest of the planet. This position and the extractive wealth of neocolonialism in the late 20th century until roughly the turn of the millennium allowed a degree of amelioration for the underclasses that Marx did not predict Capital would allow for its petit bourgeois.

This was a temporary sacrifice for Capital, then mostly centralised in the United States. A very narrow vision of prosperity was formulated: The generation returning from WW2 could be compensated with an automobile and a house in the suburban experiment that the US was undertaking. Each segregated into their own little single-family home kingdoms in car-dependent suburbia, this generation would become the professional class overseeing the development of Capital's new war machines, as well as the computers and algorithms for completely optimised financialization and commoditization of all aspects of life, and later for the surveillance and propagandizing of all workers globally.

Of course none of this was sustainable, but it was the easiest way to build the world's first truly global empire. The professionals who benefited from the massive federal and state subsidies that allowed infrastructure installations rivaling that of cities at the time in these low density suburbs were happy to spend their working lives developing systems of monitoring and control if it meant they could live this comfortable lifestyle, imagining themselves outside of the social fabric in their low density, federally-subsidized, car-dependent suburbs.

Eventually these places all crumble since they don't generate nearly enough tax revenue to cover the cost of maintaining the subsidized infrastructure that's been handed out to these areas on the dole. The areas that experience periods of growth are able to hide the problem by taking more subsidies to build more new, sprawling infrastructure. Since it takes a while for infrastructure to degrade to the point where it absolutely needs maintenance to function, these tax revenues from new residents can be used to repair the most visible deficiencies. In other contexts, this is known as a "Ponzi scheme," but ultimately it's not like you can break even when you're losing money on every new suburb once it needs maintenance. This is why the US is in debt, the military spending is kind of a red herring since it was largely necessary for the levels of extractive exploitation the US was able to carry out abroad, which did trickle back into at least allowing the Feds to subsidize the interest on public debts taken to repair roads and wastewater processing facilities. But the US also invested a ton into fighting "communism", by pouring investment dollars into foreign economies that seemed about to revolt. This enabled an international competition which then imploded the US' manufacturing base. Further deregulation of industry and financial markets allowed companies, now international entities, to lift and shift operations to other countries thus depriving the US of even the undersized tax base it had enjoyed.

So now the US' domestic constituency is left holding the bag for 7 decades of crumbling, sprawling, unsustainable infrastructure installations. Its urban centers were also never reinvested in, that money mostly went toward suburbs. Money spent in existing urban areas was just to make them car-dependent. Massive urban highway expansion and interchanges were integral to enabling suburban commutes. It also served to degrade and ghettoized communities adjacent to these urban highways, by bulldozing existing blocks to build them.

But all of that looked a lot better than the bare exploitation of labour by the State which was occuring in the consumer-oriented communism of the Soviet Union. Without the market system, alienation under the Soviet system was much more stark because there was nothing to mystify the workers' relationship with the means of production as there is in a society where Capital owns the means of production, the media, and orchestrates the State levers of power.