It was plenty of things besides that, although it was also that.

>>974479
Empire is not a government system, although USSR was an empire. As far as monarchy goes, sort of. Soviet Union was indeed a case of traditional authority in a non-monarchic country.

It was a party administered oligarchy you plebs.

Politburo had all the power, the premier wasn't always an absolutist dictator like Stalin.

>>974544
And not all monarchy is absolute.

>>974552

Monarchy implies a someone ruling due to his stature in the nobility, or hereditary position with regards to a throne.

You are using that term wrongly.

Empire isn't a form of government. But otherwise yea. Before 1924 the All-Russian Congress of Soviets included a variety of parties and Lenin wasn't an ultimate dictator, people like Trotsky, Bukharin and Kamenev all had authority and the actual Soviets were still relevant.

There were also a couple years at the end of Perestroika where Gorbachev was President and there was an attempt at democracy.

>>974568
>Monarchy implies a someone ruling due to his stature in the nobility
I.e. someone high enough in the party ranks.

>or hereditary position with regards to a throne
There were elective monarchies too, of course.

USSR fits that just fine.

>>974571

They say that it became in Empire or had imperialistic leanings with 1919 Polish war, but I call bullshit on that. Poland was nothing to the Soviets but a way to link up with Spartacists in Germany.

Marx wrote that every state is a dictatorship. Gramsci built off this, clarifying that, while this is true, a stable and 'successful' state is not only a dictatorship. This is where the theory of Hegemony comes from. From the French Revolution on various nations such as those in Western Europe successfully placed the reigns of their states superstructure (bureaucracy, education, army, press etc.) in the hands of the bourgeoisie. After mass suffrage, this lead to regimes which had elections and called themselves democracies without ever really allowing power to slip away from the ruling class, and thus a hegemony, or perhaps what we might call a dictatorship of the bourgeois, was established. The Soviet Union failed to create a hegemony, and thus remained a dictatorship until its collapse. If it had made itself a true hegemony, you could've had elections where there are disagreements on this and that but the underlying truths of the state apparatus are not questioned, as is the case in Western democracy.

>>974579

That would be describing more post-Kruschev Soviet Russia, were the central committee and everyone linked to them became essentially a "party nobility". But it doesn't explain early Soviet Union were authority was pretty much divided amongst the Politburo, the Party congress and the central committee, with the Premier arbitrating over the three.

>>974621
I'd say it became imperialist under Stalin and his socialism in one country policies. Lenin's Russian SFSR and early USSR operated entirely in the interest of the worldwide revolution. Giving up land in Brest-Litovsk. Invading Poland to create a bridge into Europe for the revolution. Supporting (absolutely for free) Kemalist Turkey in war against christian Armenia because Turkey was revolutionary and resisted Entente and Armenia wasn't. Etc. It's an opposite of an empire, the revolution-torn country was bleeding men and resources to wage wars for everyone in hopes it would trigger revolutions

>>974637

This is why Lenin fucked it all up with the vanguard party bullshit.

Though I don't blame him in the end he had a war to fight to the death.

>>974621
You can say it started to have strong imperialistic leanings after invading Ukrainian People's Republic in 1918 already.

>UPR was a sovereign state recognized by Soviet Russia itself
>UPR (Directorate) was already left as fuck, so left that Entente was cautious about it
>UPR wanted to get Russia to fuck off and let them coexist peacefully

Of course with Lenin and his views on "Great-Russian chauvinism" as he called Russian imperialist worldview it wasn't as bad as later on, but the foundation was still there.

>>974479
You are confusing authoritarianism with "monarchy". Which is a shame really, because by doing this you lose sight of the unique insidious nature of totalitarianism within the bolshevik party.

>>974662
The issue was that the way people worked the day before the revolution and the way after was basically the same. Richard Wolff talks about this.

I think Lenin made mistakes, but I can't really say the revolution happening in the first place was bad. A dictatorship of the proletariat doesn't mean what we think it means today, considering, as I said, Europe at the time was a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

>>974568
>it's an anon didn't study history and doesn't realize there are other kinds of monarchy besides absolute monarchy episode

Just kill me now.