I wonder what the modern world would look like had the USSR not been dissolved, and repaired its relationship with the PRC.

“If the USSR still existed/won the Cold War” is my absolute favourite kind of alt history. (Well, I also like hate reading/watching “if Germany won WWII” crap because it’s all so hilariously implausible.) God, that’d be the dream. If only we had gotten the Cold War good ending. I wish the USSR had won both the scientific and military tech races and the cultural dominance game. I wish I lived in a world where it was normal and commonplace across the world to celebrate the anniversary of the Great October Revolution. I wish socialism had won before I was born and the existence of capitalism was just a chapter in my primary school history textbooks.

But that didn’t happen, so we the Western Left have to learn from the Soviets’ successes and failures, and keep fighting to build socialism in our own land.

Same. I know that trends are on our side, but it’s so tragic that the USSR isn’t still here. I do have hope of it returning, though, the KPRF has 63000 new members over the last few years and socialism is increasingly popular in Russia.

It’ll never be the same, but that makes me feel hopeful, funnily enough. I know that restoring the USSR isn’t a magic bullet that’ll bring back the entire 1916-23 revolutionary wave and make it actually work how Lenin predicted this time around, and I’m not even old enough to be the type of washed up old Cold War era Comintern type who thinks of the USSR as a necessary and key guiding star of global socialism that makes our movements all stronger through its own existence, and yet, I still think that reconstructing it will somehow help the Western left. Or at least make having Opinions on the Cold War a little fun and a little scary again.

I think a lot of what Western leftists miss the USSR over… is not anything that will automatically return if Russia becomes a socialist state again. And yet, I still want the USSR back anyway.

Russia going socialist again would certainly strengthen the anti-imperialist movement dramatically, and would give quite a lot of momentum on the western left. The fall of the USSR dramatically raised global disparity, as socialism wasn’t seen as a major threat: