but you cannot deny that he was on of its greatest exponents
While the revolution was a great propaganda victory for Socialists globally, almost every group that sprung up inspired by the revolution later became controlled by Moscow.
For example, the communists in my home country, the Communist Party of the USA, were summoned to Moscow by Stalin and had their more anarchist/democratic leaning factions purged, with some even being arrested and kept in Moscow till they died. The amount of control that Stalin and the Comintern had on international communism lead to repeated purges of more democratic/less Authoritarian socialists and basically ensured that Stalinist/Marxist Leninist Socialism was the only type allowed to flourish in any form for most of the cold war.
I certainly couldn't predict what would've changed had the Russian Revolution been more democratic/pluralist, or had a more democratic revolution inspired the last century of global Socialism, but I at least believe that Socialism wouldn't face the uphill "Gulags, Famine, Stalin, Mao" battle that it currently does.
Peace between us, war on the bourgeoisie, comrade
I would love nothing more than a united left, but it's more the actions of Marxist Leninist inspired governments after their revolutions, (Universal banning of non-Leninist Socialists, Universal banning of pluralist socialist democracy, Yugoslav's Split, 1956, and 1968) that makes me bash against ML's. It's hard to trust talk of leftist unity when the history of Leninism has involved the crushing of any other form of leftism since its inception.
Nice propaganda bro, sources would be nice.
The coup took place before the October Revolution and was crushed by the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks before the October Revolution even started.
Oh the good old, "Call them counter revolutionary and now it's okay to shoot them". The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries had a far bigger hand in the Febuary Revolution than the Bolsheviks, and later had their legitimacy confirmed with a free election. If anyone was counter-revolutionary it'd be the betrayers of the majority elected socialist government, the Bolsheviks under Lenin.
Nice try, but the Union's under Marxist Leninist regimes are always heavily policed and controlled by their respective governments. "In this respect, through the Western lens of a dichotomy of independent unions versus company unions, they were more accurately comparable to company unions, as "unlike unions in the West, the Soviet variety do not fight for the economic interests of the workers. They are conveyor belts for Party instructions, carrying punishments and rewards to industrial and collective farm employees. Soviet trade unions work with their employer, the government, and not against it." I'm not completely against planning, but I'm against banning any form of independent organization/representation for workers, and then striking them down whenever they complain.
While the soviets did eventually institute some rather progressive welfare reforms for their time, these reforms had no popular demand from the working class that grain requisition did originally, and were put in place from above, not gained through demands of a working class movement. I believe most Leninists would call this a Bourgeoisie Concession had it happened in a capitalist country.
The Bolsheviks only faced an allied invasion after having pulled out of the war and signed a separate peace with the Germans through Brest-Litovsk, which happened after the bolsheviks had overthrown the mensheviks. More importantly though, the civil war didn't even start until the Bolsheviks had crushed their socialist opposition. The Tsarists had almost zero power and were thoroughly crushed after events such as the Kornilov affair, and it would've stayed that way had the Bolsheviks not fractured the Russian socialist movement.
I actually have far more of a problem with Stalins actions in the 1920s before the Great Purge and World War 2. Between Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Ryhzkov, and their supporters, Stalin had effectively crushed any opposition even within the party. Not though discrediting them intellectually or by testing their ideas and showing the failures, but instead by killing or imprisoning them.
I thoroughly believe these conflicts during the 1920s were what doomed the USSR, Stalin had killed almost all competing ideas for a potentially better Socialism, even among fellow Leninists. And through his purges Stalin became the gold standard of Leninism for the USSR, with the effective intellectual ban on the ideas of Bukharin, Zinoviev, and Trotsky lasting until the end of the USSR.
That is what I tried to do here, and is why I'm majoring in Soviet history, but I don't think just quoting the old propaganda justifications or Parenti counts as sober analysis. As socialists I believe we should focus historically on the possible off-ramps from authoritarianism that the USSR and all "Actually Existing Socialist" states had. Which is why I focus on Stalin and how the collection of power into Lenin's position lead to the possibility of much larger later abuses under Stalin, imagine how much could've changed had after the civil war the Factions ban been lifted and the working class was allowed to choose between the Workers Opposition, Left Opposition or Right Opposition in free and fair internal Party elections like takes place now in most modern Socialist parties. I'm sure in this scenario Stalin wouldn't of been able to commit the atrocities he later did, and that Soviet politics would rely much more on the will of the working class than behind the curtain political maneuvering.