ive heard mixed things about makhno, but generally more positive than I have about lenin and his ilk. The situation was extreme, but I don't think there were any ways his people were worse than the red army.

I know less about spain, I mostly read lib shit on the subject so I don't entirely trust my knowledge base there.

every criticism I have for the USSR is tempered, like, there was never a reason to expect it to be less awful than it was and a lot of reasons to expect it to be worse, and the reasons it wasn't worse were probably entirely down to communism, but it was not a good or nice place. not that it ever had the chance to be, having been a pre-industrial shithole full of illiterate peasants used to being ruled by a king with barely any concept of their own authority spread out over 11 time zones with almost no infrastructure in most of them and immediately, from the moment of its conception, which only happened because everyone was already angry and hopeless and wracked by grief and loss at taking the ass end of the worst war humanity had known to date, attacked by capitalist world powers looking to sabotage it and cutting it off from anything it couldn't produce domestically(in their extreme climate) while it had to play at being a first world country AND defend itself from literally the entire rest of the continent plus like three others. they punched way above their weight class in a lot of things, and did far better than they had any right to. but also it was a totally reactionary shit hole that pumped its people full of xenophobic propaganda out of fear, and should never be held up as the example of 'communism works'. cuba or vietnam both work better for that, not that they don't have their own problems.