I'd agree with your post that started this thread, McGrath. It was never a point of "socialism" having been tried in Russia and having failed. After all, socialism has been tried in some Scandinavian countries (democracies) and other places and has undoubtedly succeeded. ;-) (What was tried in Russia and failed was an overly rigid authoritarian political system which attempted to compete economically and militarily with someone else who had considerably greater financial and human resources, and bankrupted itself in the process. The Russians would have failed regardless of whether they were capitalist or socialist, because their approach was too heavy-handed to keep their population happy and they took on more than they could handle in military spending. The same thing happened to the Nazis...but in a hot war, not a cold war, so it happened a lot faster and more violently.)

You speak of a form of "Russian bureaucratic imperialism which, in its esentials, predated the October Revolution"...

Yes. Very much so. But one could just as well speak of British bureaucratic imperialism...a long established force which has profoundly altered world history as it went all over the globe conquering other places.

Or American bureaucratic imperialism...first proclaimed in the Monroe Doctrine...expanded greatly after the very convenient (from the USA's point of view) Spanish-American War...and gone totally hogwild since the end of WWII.

Or German bureaucratic imperialism...begun successfully under the wise hand of Bismark...gone to ruin and disaster under the less wise hands of Kaiser Wilhelm and Adolf Hitler.

Or French bureaucratic imperialism...quite successful at times, but hampered considerably by Great Britain's skill at warfare on land and sea.

Or Spanish bureaucratic imperialism...which made them the world power for awhile, but was brought down gradually by the English.

And so on, and so on....

Then there's the Japanese, the Italians, the Dutch, the Belgians, the Chinese...

There are a whole lot of bureaucratic imperialists out there waiting their historical turn at becoming THE world power. All of them will pretend to be the most progressive society with the best ideas. All of them will assert that in some way they are saving the world and leading it into a better age. All of them do it strictly for their own gain. It has little to do essentially with either capitalism or socialism...although it can harness either one in service of imperial ambition.

I'll say this, though...large-scale capitalism, by its very nature, seeks to expand and enlarge itself indefinitely and to devour all available resources and take over all available markets. In so doing it becomes a menace to the natural environment and to everything living on this planet. As such, it may prove to be the greatest threat of all, since it is driven not by the urge to do anything genuinely useful, but simply the urge to make more money. And money is a completely artificial thing. It's a mere idea that people made up. It's a fiction that we all agree to pretend is real. It's not wise to devote the entire resources of a world merely to accumulate more of an artificial thing that cannot be eaten when all the real edible stuff is gone.