If anything a more authoritarian power structure and less "political pluralism" could have seen it still going strong to this day and I say this as someone who is generally critical of vanguardism and socialist personality cults. The failure of the August Coup and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Much better examples of the dangers of power concentration and vaguardism are the Sino-Soviet split, which was at least in part driven by Mao and Kruschev's personal dislike of each other, and the terror tactics the Bolsheviks used in the late 1910s to establish dictatorships of the proletariat (from which they excluded peasants) in overwhelmingly peasant dominated areas.
That being said, while there are valid criticisms to be made of the Bolshevik revolution and USSR policies, they were better for the world and the people of Russia than what came before them, what came after them, and 90% of other nation states that existed at the same time as them. While you can point to some things they maybe could have done better, it's hard to argue that they shouldn't have overthrown the Russian Empire, that they should have imitated the rapacious capitalist imperialist looting of the rest of the world the EU & USA wholeheartedly engaged in, or that it was a good thing the USSR capitulated into the neoliberal shock therapied protofash mafia disaster of a state that is modern Russia.
The USSR failed because the US State department lead by Hillary Fucking Clinton succesfully couped them.
If anything a more authoritarian power structure and less "political pluralism" could have seen it still going strong to this day and I say this as someone who is generally critical of vanguardism and socialist personality cults. The failure of the August Coup and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Much better examples of the dangers of power concentration and vaguardism are the Sino-Soviet split, which was at least in part driven by Mao and Kruschev's personal dislike of each other, and the terror tactics the Bolsheviks used in the late 1910s to establish dictatorships of the proletariat (from which they excluded peasants) in overwhelmingly peasant dominated areas.
That being said, while there are valid criticisms to be made of the Bolshevik revolution and USSR policies, they were better for the world and the people of Russia than what came before them, what came after them, and 90% of other nation states that existed at the same time as them. While you can point to some things they maybe could have done better, it's hard to argue that they shouldn't have overthrown the Russian Empire, that they should have imitated the rapacious capitalist imperialist looting of the rest of the world the EU & USA wholeheartedly engaged in, or that it was a good thing the USSR capitulated into the neoliberal shock therapied protofash mafia disaster of a state that is modern Russia.