the most important tasks¶

One of the most important tasks for communists in educating the masses and elevating class consciousness is undoing a century of propaganda around past and existing socialist experiments.

For example, the idea that communism involves suppressing creativity and joy. Every image you have in your brain about the Soviet Union being a dour, starving place with no organic artistic expression is wrong. There WERE hard times:

Early in its formation, when it was recovering from the imperialist intervention that nearly killed the revolution. The 1930s famine, caused by several severe droughts and too many agricultural workers having shifted to industry to compensate.

WWII, which destroyed much of the infrastructure in the west and killed millions of Soviet citizens.

These were periods of national misery. The only other time the Soviet people faced major shortages was in the immediate aftermath of the breakup of the union, when shock therapy sent everything into private hands. Living standards collapsed overnight in the most significant backslide in human history. There is a LOT the Soviet Union could have done better. No one should deny that. But it was not some tortured wasteland where no one was allowed to experience joy or hope. There's a reason people today who lived in the USSR miss it by huge margins.