The Soviet Union comprises the most audacious exploitation and betrayal of working people that has ever been achieved. Working people are more oppressed in Russia today than almost anywhere else in the world, and they are kept that way by a police state Stalin helped design. Millions were worked to death to industrialize Russia. Millions more were enslaved in the gulags and exterminated in purges. All the while they were promised their work would not be in vain. And what is the outcome of all this suffering and endless toil? Stalin's name and face is stamped on the pages of history — there are statues of him, he is a legend, he is a Great Man of the 20th century. Meanwhile, the Russians suffer a worse religious autocracy under Putin than under the tsars.

The tsars were brutal monsters, but they patronized the arts and gave us Pushkin and Rachmaninoff. Modern Russia's autocracy lacks the saving grace of high cultural productions. If modern Russia were granted another Pushkin, a sneering oligarch would have him pushed out a window. The Russian oligarchs are, quite openly and proudly, career criminals of a dull and brutal breed. They seized power in the collapse of the USSR, and they are not capable of elevating Russia. They want to drive big cars and wear big rings. Not all of them have the imaginative capacities of a boiled pea, but enough of them do. That is partly why Russia is in such a desperate state.

It is obvious the "worker's revolution" was not a movement for the working class, or by the working class, except in terms of casualties. Our species has endured a century of these tinpot revolutions and learned nothing. Like many other countries, the revolution in Russia constituted a successful attempt by intellectuals to seize power. It ultimately brought that nation war, land, and a lack of bread. The revolution has fulfilled exactly one promise to the working class: it revolved.

Stalin died suddenly, without preparing an effective transfer of power. Such a colossal oversight from such a powerful man suggests he had partly given up on the whole project. The endless horrors, lies, broken promises, and uncompromising cruelty failed to build a strong national spirit. A hollowed-out Russia was propped up with short-lived democracy, which predictably decayed into a generic tyranny of robber barons. But at least, thanks to industrialization, it is a tyranny with nuclear weapons.