Yep, exactly those guys. Again he was authoritarian as fuck, but it’s not like the USSR Communists invented authoritarian socialism; that was already a thing by that point. One can be a socialist without believing in democracy.

...

Please note that I cited one-man direction in the workplace.

In what world is managerial control by bureaucrats in an undemocratic system socialism?

Premodern China had private property, though, which is the crux of the thing here.

Technically so did the Stalinist-era Soviet Union. In both cases, to varying degrees, it was marginalized in favor of state control.

Political systems and economic systems influence each other, but in terms of categorization they’re more or less orthogonal.

what

I mean it’s not my idea of preparation for communism, but it’s an idea of preparation for communism. Industrialization and modernization as prerequisites wouldn’t have been particularly controversial.

... "Democracy is a prerequisite for socialism" gets you to call the architects indistinguishable from liberals, and therefore unworthy of being called even 'socialist-leaning', but "Genocide and suppression of the proletariat is a prerequisite for socialism" means that it's unfair to call them anything but true-believer communists?

From there the only logical leap needed is “you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs” and “if we don’t hurry they’ll fucking kill us” (which is basically what happened).

fucking what

…why?

... because people use fringe organizations to climb the ladder all the time without being true believers?

"Every Old Bolshevik, bottom-to-top, was a true believer!" is a fucking insane position to take, and what your claim necessarily implies. Not only that, but it also necessarily suggests many of the socialists you've derided are, likewise, true believers and thus 'deserving' of being called socialists - yet in contradiction to this necessary implication, you parrot the Bolshevik line of them just being liberals painted red (ironic, considering Bolsheviks are fascists painted red, but there's no power like projection). Furthermore, your position suggests that few, if any, major mass murderers were anything but true believers, not opportunists, which is dubious at best.