Real socialism replaced by rampant capitalism.

I write as a beneficiary of the 1917 Revolution, which from the very first moment transcended the broad territorial and political limits inherited from the Tsarist empire – two centuries of Mongol rule, four of monarchical absolutism – founded on the most brutal repression, on the absence of rights for workers, servants and outcasts serving a social structure based on modes of human exploitation similar to slavery, which included physical punishment.

A popular and mass uprising – peasants, soldiers, sailors, workers led by Leninism – fighting against the world (during the civil war, just after the First World War, Russia suffered the invasion of 15 foreign armies), the Bolshevik Revolution achieved surprising success in a country without an industrial base, changed the course of history for the better, and its achievements remain relevant today, many incorporated into the political heritage of humanity and even assimilated by social-democratic governments.

She promoted women's rights, established the first universal (free) healthcare system, promoted public education (from preschool to university), housing, mass public transportation, and full employment—still Brazilian dreams in the second decade of the third millennium.
His influence on the world did not end on the night of December 26, 1991, when the red flag was lowered for the last time from the Kremlin flagpole and Gorbachev handed the baton to Yeltsin.

We owe our very survival to the Bolshevik Revolution: after sparing humanity from Nazi-fascist totalitarianism by defeating Germany – at the cost of the deaths of 22 million Soviet men and women, soldiers and civilians – it saved us from planetary destruction, deterring the nuclear war pursued by the US and its tributary countries after the Second World War.

The military, scientific, and technological efforts undertaken by the USSR, even at the expense of the quality of life of its people (one of the roots of the debacle), made possible the nuclear parity that prevented, and has been preventing until now, for an unknown period of time, the catastrophe with which the Cold War threatened to destroy the Earth. This specter, moreover, is always present as long as peace depends on the interests that drive the military-industrial complex governing the USA – in uninterrupted war for over a century! – or as long as the future of humanity depends on the insanity of leaders like Donald Trump.

The 1917 Revolution – the first major attempt to build a society founded on equality, the first project to abolish private property, the promise of a state run by workers – definitively altered world geopolitics, influenced political and philosophical thought, and triggered colonialism, racism, and apartheid, definitively shaking the sources of power for the old European powers.

Victorious in World War II, the USSR was the midwife of the decolonization of Africa and Asia, fostered and guaranteed experiences such as the Cuban one, and was decisive in the liberation of Vietnam. In short, there was not a single experience of struggle for national independence in the last century that did not have contact with the material, military, and political cooperation of the USSR.

Their economic, social, scientific, and military successes became instruments of ideological struggle and fueled the organization of workers throughout the world, paving the way for socialist, labor, and left-wing parties, to which social democracy and conservative forces had to respond, fearing that the Soviet example, gaining social awareness, would be reproduced in their countries.

The social and economic policies of the capitalist West were forced to make concessions to socialist programs as an attempt, ultimately successful, to manage the class struggle, at a time when the communist movement was growing globally.

In its wake, democratic, socialist, and progressive policies in general advanced, raising to the forefront the defense of human dignity, the fight against social, economic, and ethnic discrimination, the rights of peasants and workers, trade union freedom, fundamental achievements such as the eight-hour workday, the right to holidays and retirement, universal suffrage and women's suffrage, and, especially in Europe, the defense of peace.

The Revolution and the emergence of progressive ideas also gave rise to what would be called 'social constitutionalism', decisively influencing all political constitutions drafted or revised after 1917, including the Brazilian constitutions from the 1934 text onwards.

However, once the threat ceased, the rights would cease, the gains that had been assimilated by the West would be revoked. One of the many consequences of the collapse of the USSR in 1991 is the unleashing, on a global scale, of an offensive aimed at withdrawing or reducing the rights of workers and wage earners in general, a wave that mainly affects Europe, and reaches us here, fueled by the conservative hegemony represented by the de facto government of Michel Temer and his media-financial support base.

What we are witnessing in Brazil, reproducing the antisocial advance of victorious neoliberalism, would not be possible if the rights now threatened or revoked had been supported by a broad and strong labor movement, whose decline is largely due to the crisis of leftist action and thought, triggered by the self-dissolution of the Soviet empire. One of its indicators is the almost complete bankruptcy of Western communist parties and the historical retreat of the socialist left, subsumed, politically and electorally, by social democracy in transit to the right.

A paradigmatic example is offered by Italy with the end of the Italian Communist Party and by France in our time, with the suicides of its Communist Party and Socialist Party. The communist parties, with rare exceptions, and the Portuguese one may be one of them, have self-dissolved; social democracy has opted for the right, the labor movement is confused with the conservatives, and all have renounced political-ideological debate.

The decline of the Brazilian socialist left is just one topic.

There is no flagpole for the socialist flag, which had been the unifying force behind the social struggles of the last century.

While it failed in its project to build the first experience of communist government and society, and the end of the USSR and the Chinese option constitute definitive proof of this, the great achievement of the Revolution was to transform a country with an agrarian, almost feudal economy, without an industrial base, devastated by the First World War and the civil war fueled by Western powers, lacking infrastructure, with agricultural production in decline and industry in tatters, into the second great power in the world.

It should be added that the revolution that began in 1917 would only become fully established in 1921, with the defeat of the last White Brigade in Crimea, only to face, a few years later, the second German invasion, and subsequently the isolation – political, military, economic, scientific – imposed by the former allies through a variety of actions, including sabotage.

The Soviet state, in addition to its very serious internal problems, would always have to deal, from the first to the last day, with the hostility, aggression, and political, economic, scientific, technological, and military blockade imposed by the Western powers. To contain 'communist expansionism,' NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – was created in 1949, the most terrible and powerful military coalition ever known to humanity, still standing and posing a threat today.

The military offensive, demanding an effort from the USSR beyond its capabilities, was, however, only one facet of the anti-communist war, not necessarily the bloodiest, since the great victory of imperialism occurs in the ideological field, thanks to the monopoly of information and the suppression of national values.

'Globalization', a project of financial capitalism, goes far beyond the internationalization of the economy, armies, and defense policies, because, after undermining national sovereignties, it establishes war within peace, the dictatorship of a single way of thinking, ideological unanimity, and the adoption, even by poor nations, of the ethical, social, aesthetic, and political value system of capitalism.

The debacle, triggered without the West needing to fire a single shot, the interruption of the so-called 'real socialism' experiment, replaced by the concrete reality of a savage capitalism, represents, however, like the other side of the same coin, a geopolitical catastrophe when it consolidates the economic, military, political and cultural hegemony of a single imperialist and warlike power.

Perhaps it is still too early to judge this Revolution, which represented for the world the promise of a classless society and bequeathed to us a model of an authoritarian and bureaucratic state. Just as it may still be too early to explain Russian society today and the contemporary ebb of the libertarian ideals of socialism that captivated the world in the first half of the last century.