> Thank you for taking things at face value instead of hysterically posting that I am a Trotskyist, I appreciate it!

I'm just quoting your own words[0].

I get the impression that many people are used to seeing more moderate, mainstream progressive positions slurred with the label "Communist" (with a capital C), and sought to cast your position in a more moderate light. I don't see anything inaccurate in characterize you as a Communist (of which Trotskyists are a flavor). You're certainly welcome to own and defend that position, but it is undeniably an extreme position (even on the Internet).

I can also understand if some want to distinguish socialism (or their own variant of it) from the strain(s) that produced the USSR, perhaps in order to avoid the stigma, no such distinction is possible in your case. Any such association is something you have to deal with directly.

> I have one comment here which is that soviet is just the Russian word for council and originally meant bottom-up, democratic structures of workers and soldiers that eventually took power because they and only they were willing to end WWI, give land to the peasants, and break the power of the capitalist class.

There are other interpretations that paint the revolution in a somewhat dimmer light[1].

> Then, due mostly to Russia's extreme backwardness as well as attack by literally 28 capitalist countries including all the previous belligerents of WW1, the USSR degenerated into a bureaucratic monstrosity that fetishized the word "soviet".

> The original Bolsheviks predicted this and had no hope of success without socialism being achieved in a rich country and coming to their aid; Russia did not have the economic basis for socialism. As Trotsky put it, "When there is little bread, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy."

"I was brutal to my own people because my enemies were mean" is a terrible justification the atrocities committed by the USSR, both at the beginning and throughout the decades of it's reign of terror.

> Capitalism is hurtling towards revolutionary crisis and stopping it is impossible, but if we achieve socialism on a better basis than Russia did, I'm optimistic we can overcome their specific problems.

In principle I think it's reasonable to discuss why the Russian revolution failed to achieve it's objectives, and whether we could achieve them ourselves. Whitewashing the crimes does not lead me to think it will be a fruitful discussion in this context.

> This has to be dramatically more democratic than Russia but the comparison point is, right now, nurses are fired if they wear masks in many hospitals (https://theintercept.com/2020/03/24/kaiser-permanente-nurses...).

Saying that (the lack of) democratic planning of the economy or the healthcare system has anything to do with nurses being fired for wearing masks (which is truly a terrible tragedy) is illogical. All it takes to deal with that problem is the willingness to put the truth above controlling public perception, something which the USSR[2] and it's Western[3] sympathizers were not especially good at.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22698823
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty