Oh vell...maybe wildgoosechase wasn't so far wrong, just no need to resort to invective. Purely socialistic countries are simply unreal, with no freedoms, black markets galore, and at the bottom of it all--and this is the secret--they are all CAPITALISTIC--they just do it very badly, reducing everything to dullness. The Soviet Union was one of the dreariest, most paranoia-inducing places ever created, and the only things that had any merit were antiques left over from the tsars like ballet and jewels. They were all thoroughly as corrupt as possible, and brutal and murderous. They sent people away and shot them for disloyalty to the fucked-up Marxist regimes. Pure socialism is a thing of the past and totally and completely worthless. There is poverty everywhere, and everybody was in some sense impoverished in the Soviet Union--one of the dullest societies known in history.
The kind of brutality practised by Stalin is not something one can accuse even the lowest of Western presidents of, except Hitler, and he's no worse than Stalin or Mao. It is totally naive to imagine that Marxism has ever done anything but transfer power from the winners to the losers--and the losers always have to hire the deposed winners to even show them how to run their shitful bureaucracies, because they're stupid, ignorant and don't know shit.
Socialism never works at all except as an adjunct to successful capitalist nations. Otherwise, you can be sad about suffering people under capitalism, but there is always something to be sad about. The problem is people not knowing who their own people are and caring first and foremost about them. But there has to be some really good reason why people were always trying to escape from East Berlin, from Russia and come to the West. Because in general it is better here.
I thought wildgoosechase was too rough, but you really sound as though you don't know the total evils of the Soviet Union and the MILLIONS of people Mao Tse-Tung had murdered over his vile and impious reign. Endless reigns of terror.
Capitalism is neither evil nor wonderful, it's simply the way things are, and a version of non-dynamic capitalism always existed as the economic base of these repulsive and inhuman Communist regimes.