I’ve seen this discussed before in short form, usually with glib, easy answers like, “power corrupts”, or “they just hijacked the ideology because they wanted power”. But as much as I love to punch totalitarians, it doesn’t ring true to me. Fascism was always just as attractive during the time communism rose, and it seems a lot simpler: there’s us, there’s them outside our borders(as well as minorities inside our borders), and you should be for us. Oh, and here’s a dab of socialism so we seem to be champions of the working class. Communism, though, was freakin’ complicated. People don’t need to be educated to make a nationalist pitch to them. Communism by contrast requires indoctrination and some fairly complex ideas. Plus there’s limited appeal. Nationalism can be sold to poor, middle class, and rich alike. Communism is primarily a lower working class phenomenon. Even the middle class is generally hostile to the idea. Just seems an unnecessarily complicated way to just take power and lord it over people.
But nowhere among those ideas is totalitarianism really a selling point. Nor does it seem particularly necessary to control people’s lives to the extent communist nations did. Why are free unions a problem? Why is a free press a problem? Why must foreign ideas be kept out? Why must the world of the arts be controlled? Why can free elections never be allowed? And most importantly, from an ideological standpoint, what was accomplished between the Bolshevik Revolution and the 1980s when it all started to crumble? Was there any progress at all towards any communist goals? It was just all sacrifice and toil all the time for the workers and not so much as reliable bread supplies or a decent car or house 60 years later, and all the authorities had to offer were exhortations to work harder. They were full of five year economic plans but did they have any plans to actually make the system work for the average person at some point?