Lemmygrad sidebar, rule 3:

Be respectful. This is a safe space where all comrades should feel welcome, this includes a warning against uncritical sectarianism.

“You’re a fucking moron” doesn’t sound like a respectful thing to say to your comrades. That user sounded like they wanted to start shit, throwing around accusations and providing zero reasons. They didn’t get banned for calling an admin a moron and nothing else.

If I was a forum admin I would forbid reddit brain and ban without mercy.

But its not true that in the 80s “there was no food”. Sure there were shortages and no luxury goods, but noone starved, the starvation began after communism fell. Not even in Romania, the country with the worst living standards in the 80s due to the austerity regime, were people actually starving. About soviet revisionism you can read Mao and Hoxha, although they also ended up falling into their own type of revisionism in my opinion (Mao promoted the cultural revolution and allied with the US against the USSR and Hoxha became completely isolated from all countries and also funded terrorist groups in Kosovo in Yugoslavia). On the USSR you should read a book called “Socialism Betrayed” by Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny, which explores why the USSR collapsed.

The biggest reason is imo revisionism. After Stalin died, the bureoucrats and opportunists that had been targeted by his policies (unlike whats often believed, Stalin fought very hard for democracy and worker power and against bureoucrats. He encouraged open criticism of bureoucrats and party officials at all levels, always sided with the workers against the bureoucrats if a dispute between them occured and was ruthless with corruption) and especially during the Great Purges took control of the party represented by Nikita Khrushchev. In 1956, at the 20th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) he made his famous Secret Speech, in which he falsely accused Stalin of terrible crimes and atrocities including arbitrary executions of party officials (this speech is the main origin for most antiStalin myths that are told nowadays, to see evidence that they are false read “Khrushchev Lied” by Grover Furr). This speech was used to launch destalinization, in which among other things every anticorruption and antibureoucrat policy promoted by Stalin was rolled back under the guise that they were “tyrannical measures” imposed by Stalin. He also started pushing nonsense ideas like that the west and east blocs could coexist in peace forever so might as well be friends with them.

This angered China and Albania who read into his bs and caused the Albanian Soviet and Sino Soviet Splits. Seeing what he was doing, principled communists loyal to Stalins principles like Molotov tried to depose him as General Secretary by voting him out, but Khrushchev in alliance with the famed WW2 hero Zhukov staged a military coup and arrested them as an “anti party group”. Later on Khrushchev also betrayed Zhukov, concentrating all power in his hands. After his bs went too far, the CPSU voted to deposed Khrushchev and Brezhnev came to power, reversing some of his bs (restoring democracy to the party, changing the foreign policy back to antiimperialism) but a big damage had already been done. This meant that overtime corruption and nepotism separated the party from the people and caused the party to not adequately represent the will of the people. This together with bad economic policies that delegated economic power to low level bureoucrats instead of planning effectively from the top with input from the workers caused stagnation and discontent, which worked perfectly for liberal populists like Gorbachev and Yeltsin to gain power and popularity and destroy the USSR. This is a simplification, the book goes much more into detail.