[powertower]

> The office of President wasn't created until 1990, and there was only one person to hold that office.

I was being general (and going throughout USSR's history, not just after 1990). There were all kinds of titles and offices and committees, with a central official that the public could see: Chairman, General Secretary, First Secretary, etc.

"President", from the outside perspective [we are not in the Soviet Union], is good enough for the description against the argument that was being made (of a Stalin type "dictatorship").

If you have to nitpick on the word, your argument will never end...

> The dictators (such as they were) were usually the General Secretaries of the Communist Party (including the three that were Premiers). Like most real dictatorships, rather than theoretical ones, there was a lot of power within the upper bureaucracy and shifting practical, if not consistent legal, checks on the power of the leader (particularly, the Politburo was powerful), and like most 20th century and later dictatorshios there was also a lot of political theater behind which the actions of the dictatorship were cloaked to give a veneer of legitimacy.

And after all that said, no one can still name just 1 / like they name Stalin?

The answer is "its an etheric dictatorship that could be this or that or anything I want it to be to for the arguments sake"?

> Communism is broader than Marxism; as well as things like anarchocommunism, it also includes Leninism, which while it claims to be Marxism rejects several key components of Marxism.

Which is all similar to the various radioactive Plutonium isotopes. None of which you are going to want to ingest. Because if you do, its only a matter of time before you die.

[dragonwriter]

> And after all that said, no one can still name just 1 / like they name Stalin?

Uh, since I said the list included all three Premiers that were also General Secretaries of the CPSU, that's equivalent to naming Kruschev. (Lenin was before Stalin and Stalin was Stalin.)

> Which is all similar to the various radioactive Plutonium isotopes.

Arguably, in the case of Marxism vs. Leninism, it's more similar to the relation between the abstract concept of a “democratic republic” and the concrete state known as the “German Democratic Republic.”

[powertower]

You've named all people who could be removed just as easily as they where placed into power.

That is not a dictatorship. I'll provide an example -

Saddam Hussein was a dictator... He had the power/authority, ability, and the will, to kill half the country's population to control the other half. Not that he did it.

Thats a real dictatorship.

Another way to think about this -

Within the Soviet Union, Russia spans 11 time-zones. Just by size alone (and the diversity it provides), the country was too large to have any effective dictatorship over because of all the different regional alliances. And they had constant problems that would never end, to prove it.

Even today, Putin himself has admitted that one of the biggest problems in Russia is that both state organizations and regional authorities will not do what they are told.

[thriftwy]

That's simply not true. Russia is very centralized. Whatever power local overlords wield, gets stripped immediately should they anger Moscow. They're usually assigned from outside and as such alien to locals.