I’m the farthest thing imaginable from a Bolshevik sympathizer but I often wonder whether big-C Communism could have survived and how it would have fared if the United States hadn’t engaged in sustained economic warfare against it. I imagine it might look something a bit like Chinese Communism does today, although perhaps those days came and went in the later eras of the Party system.
Communism depended on the west and was sustained by it. Obviously they exported raw materials to purchase the many things they failed to produce themselves including food. But also particularly, the Soviets had no way to set prices in their centrally planned economy that actually worked, so they kept the show on the road by copying prices from western free market economies.
This is one reason the USSR was always lagging behind western economies despite being scientifically advanced. They had to wait for the west to develop products and do price discovery, because GOSPLAN didn't have any way to price things properly themselves.
People who got too serious about communism tended to get eliminated by Stalin, and then the people in charge of the elimination (Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria) were in turn eliminated in later purges.
Chinese communism survives because the US spends an insane amount of money on their goods each year. It would have collapsed by now if not for the US demand for stuff.
The premise of its “success” was based on half the population working for free in the camps for the other half. Many major projects were executed with little thought for the slaves/workers that perished, all for the goals of socialism. Then oligarchy followed, without the way to increase worker productivity. The only well funded programmes were in the defence sector which bankrupted the country eventually
