The Soviet Union was a repressive dystopia. Socialist governments do not carry out purges, period. Nor do they have secret police that ‘disappear’ people for exercising free speech, nor do they exile ideological dissenters and send axe murderers to assassinate them.

I don’t advocate cooperation with the Democrats. I advocate not dismissing limited cooperation with them out of hand. There will come a day (quickly, imo) when they will no longer be suitable as allies. But (for now) they are at the very least a human shield against the fascism of McConnell and Trump’s faction of the GOP.

“As the material conditions force each revolution to adopt coercive methods to prevent reaction” - No wonder you’re defending the USSR. I categorically reject the notion that a socialist system must engage in repression - if it must, it has failed - because the entire point of socialism is to improve the lives of the proletariat. If the proletariat must be forcibly repressed for the system to remain stable, the system is not socialist. This is precisely why the USSR is not a model to follow - it was not socialist. It fell into Stalin’s fascist cult of personality, prioritized the state over the workers, and replaced tsarist repression with oligarchic repression - betraying the revolution and returning the people to slavery.