On the narrative of the "Bougie Bureaucrats".

In the left-wing discourse about the decline of the Soviet Union and other communist states from the 20th century, a certain narrative seems to repeat itself over ideological boundaries. It goes something like this:

The revolution was authentic and represented the working class, until The Bad Man came, removed power from the now oppressed proles from our favored group of good guys and introduced State Capitalism with Evil Bureaucrats.

These are examples (of course, extremely generalized):

For the anarchists, and social democrats the Bad Man was Lenin, who, as Chomsky tells us , used some sort of libertarian socialist rhetoric to lure the backwards masses into supporting his party, used the authentic working class October revolution for his own authoritarian aims, oppressed the proles when they were going to take power away from him (see Kronstadt and Mahkno) and introduced State Capitalism via bureaucracy (The New Economic Program).

Then come the Trotskyists, who claim that the Bad Man was Stalin, who used the banner of Leninism to take power from the Trotskyist Good Guys, oppressed the proles (Mass repressions, purges), introduced a bureaucratic system that removed authentic working class rule, and in the end of the day produces State Capitalism.

And finally, for Dogmatic Anti-Revisionists, Khrushchev was the Bad Man, who removed authentic working class power from the masses by introducing revisionist programs (Peaceful Coexistence), spreading lies against the Stalinist Good Guys and of course, introducing Evil Bureaucratic State Capitalism.

Now, I am not saying that any of these theories are wrong or that none of them have any merit. But,when simplistic narratives like these are constantly reemerging within the same discourse, it is a sign of idealistic thinking. The convenient fact of idealism is that you enter into investigation with all your questions about the subject already answered, which means that you simply need point at any evidence, no matter how decontextualized or contradictory your analysis is going to be in the end. I don't claim to be able to provide a more correct or useful analysis of what went wrong in the U.S.S.R or other communist projects, but if we realize whats wrong with the type of analysis that the Bougie Bureaucrat-Theory of failed revolution provides, then we can find out what really went wrong. The Bougie-Bureaucrat theory of revolutionary socialism is wrong because it values sectarianism and ones own ideological conviction over empirical fact, values Great Persons™ over material analysis, and uses the actual experience of a proletariat under the dictatorship of the proletariat for cheap trash-talk.