The problem socialists have always had was the internecine fighting from the Schactmanites to the Trotskyites to the ............. Socialists have never seemed to agree on anything to define them. In my view, Stalin was anything but a Socialist. He was a totalitarian dictator and gamed the system to his advantage. Gorbachev seemed to want the USSR to become a genuine socialist economy but wasn't able to make that work. Boris Yeltsin managed to really screw Russia up and now they have the authoritarin Putin to introduce "Shock Doctrine" capitalism. This might be short-lived as Putin becomes more authoritarian.

Trotsky was a political theorist as was Hegels and to some degree Marx who was really more of an economist. The lesson here is what happens when political philosophies become applied to governance. They change.

Frank Hamilton