I am also not an expert, but my understanding is that they made some progress on things like education and literacy rate. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_Soviet_Union
It doesn't excuse the many things that went wrong during the period. But my intuition is you cannot say it was composed 100% of bad actors and total maliciousness or even incompetence.
No-fault divorce, universal suffrage, equality of races - at least in official policy - all at once, by the 1920s. It was unprecedented.
And it worked, to a certain extent at least. Women got education and entered the (educated, professional) work force (and, during the war, combat divisions). The change for Jewish people (officially oppressed with race-specific laws in Imperial Russia) was immense (Trotsky, one of the top guys, was Jewish - as were many others, before Stalinism).
There was an explosion in arts: a revolution in cinema, music, literature, poetry, architecture, visual arts.
Basically, a lot of the bad things that people associate with Communism are Stalinism, but that came in the 30s, and went away by the 60s.
Now, a lot of other bad things were there from day 0, and some developed post-Stalin. But there were a lot of changes from 1917 to the 20s, to Stalinism, to WW2, and then to Khruschev and Brezhnev.
The country stabilized in the Kruschev-Brezhnev era, and remained static for so long that even those who liked the regime got tired of it. But it's important to see what the changes were.
And equal suffrage in a single party system? What is that worth?
That said, I think that European model is even better. Capitalism with social benefits sounds like the best of both world. Unfortunately modern Russia is more like wicked extreme capitalism. They are bouncing from one extreme to another.
If you skip the whole rulling class. High-level bureaucrats, managers and so on. With separate hospitals, shops, apartment queues and whatnot
> you had guaranteed work place
Likely on the other side of the country thousands of kilometers away. And it was easy to loose that if you stepped on wrong person's toes or came out against glorious communism. Then you'd have super hard time to get any job.
> you had guaranteed home
Likely a komunalka and then getting your own apartment in your 40s when your kids are about to move out.
> you had guaranteed education
Higher education had super tight quotas. It was common for people to take exams over and over again for years to get in. And it was easy to get rejected if you did something politically stupid back in school. Or your parents did. After you eventually graduate - you'd have to go wherever you get assignment. You get to choose from several options if lucky. But if you don't get married while studying (families get assignments to same city, so likely a major one), you're likely to be sent to bum fuck nowhere. Because all assignments to bigger cities are taken by couples.
First, definitions of soviet society, economic life and the country's political structure that try to claim the USSR didn't practice "real communism" are basically leaping right into the no true Scotsman fallacy. It was communism, or a reasonably well enough attempted recreation of the original dogma to be effectively called communism, and it was on the whole an abysmal social failure that even in its real accomplishments achieved them at far higher cost than would have been necessary. Sure, you could also argue that no western country practices true capitalism as your average hardcore libertarian would define it but the degrees of communism and capitalism practiced by both the USSR and much more market-oriented countries respectively were close enough to the "ideals" of both systems to get a solid idea of which is more workable for human society and good human development. The results were extremely divergent, and communism unarguably showed itself to be a failure.
Second, the soviet system was worse than its Tsarist counterpart. The comparisons to the Tsarist system that predated it really don't do justice to the enormous human tragedy unleashed by the Bolshevik revolution and Stalin's later rule in particular. Virtually every single element of repression, misery, poverty and death by government-caused means greatly expanded under communist rule. The Tsars had prison camps, yes, but the soviet GULAG dramatically expanded the brutality and size of the communist version, and the number of reasons that could get a person incarcerated in one of these camps expanded enormously from how things were in the last years of Tsarism. There were famines under Tsarist rule too, but the size and frequency of deadly famines under Soviet rule also enormously expanded. This last being made all the worse with many of the soviet-era famines being the result of either deliberate political intervention or sheer economic incompetence coupled with indifference (the 1921 famine after Lenin's war against the white armies, and the brutal Stalinist collectivization campaigns of the early 1930s).
A thorough reading of any number of history books about the economic and political history of the Soviet Union and Tsarism in its last century clearly shows just how much worse so many things became under the communists, and the uglier sides of the Tsarist regime get way too much attention compared to soviet brutalities as "counterexamples" of Tsarism being worse. Even the entrenched nobility repressing a mass of people with few rights was replicated under the Soviet system but, again, just as or possibly even more rigidly through the existence of the ruling "nomenklatura" and their privileges compared to those of your average Soviet majority of workers.
Sure, the Soviet Union dramatically increased literacy rates, it also electrified and massively industrialized the former Tsarist territories that became the USSR but the cost at which this was done in just a few decades literally numbers into the millions of human lives.
On a final quick note, it's also important to distinguish between Soviet communism under the rule of Lenin and Stalin and the nature of Soviet rule after Stalin's death: Political repression, indifference to mass human suffering and the killing of political prisoners all eased up dramatically from Khrushchev onwards, giving the USSR a somewhat more benign image than it really deserved if you consider how brutal life had become in the 3 decades after the Bolsheviks took power from the much more legitimately popular February revolution that had actually taken power from the last Tsar to form a more liberal democratic government.
I can provide a number of good literary sources for the above claims too if you like, just let me know in a response.
Assertion is not an argument. It clearly abandoned core principles of Marxist Communism, which it claimed to be, in order to bypass the necessity of first having a developed capitalist economy in which broad proletarian class-consciousness developed. And, whether or not one might argue that Marxist Communism itself has authoritarian elements, the vanguardista adaptations made by Lenin were necessarily radically more authoritarian.
Was the USSR’s political system something that fits in some category useful for any purpose with earlier things called “Communism”, or even later ones that aren't it's direct descendants? Maybe. But it was at least as far from Marxist Communism as the modern mixed economy that replaced the system Marx called “capitalism” throughout the developed West is, and other than propaganda utility it's hard to see what real value associating it with some broader “Communism” in opposition to the modern mixed economy has.