Socialism significantly lowered internal competion between people and as a consequence they became more trusting. If you look at Soviet leaders who were born and raised pre-revolution, they were very far from trusting the West.

You also don’t get this problem with China lol. China has always been suspicious about the West due to their semi-colonial history and everything is transactional with the West, nothing more, nothing less.

This is true to a fault. Almost all their economists are western trained or trained on western capitalist theories. Although “marxism degrees” have been rising in Chinese universities lately, I don’t think it’s Marxian economics. Xi is said to be a devout marxist leninist, but he hasn’t taken too many steps to actually promote the core of the movement - the economic systems that are supposed to replace capitalism.

Socialism with chinese characteristics describes how to accumulate productive forces in a capitalist world (within a county controlled by socialists), and you know what? It may very well be their plan to focus on one thing at a time, and it will evolve to be more communistic once they get closer to their goal and study the new conditions. It’s just difficult to have that much faith into the future when so many of the advisors are aligned with western thinking even if they don’t trust the westerners. Would these economists be nationalistic / communist enough to shift gears towards socialism when the time is right, or will they be too entrenched in capitalist thought and resist?

“Never trust the Whites”

The purge removed a lot of good communists, and lobotomized political science departments in most universities. We can talk all day about the necessity of the purge but this was undeniably one of the outcomes

It’s the failure of the Soviet education system. If we can characterize the Soviet people, it is that they are far too naive.

Eh. They were in a bad spot economically due to Saudi market manipulation at the behest of the west, a military defeat in Afghanistan, a space-race posturing/propaganda. They definitely could have held out longer but they were on the back-foot and were opting for a peaceful/graceful loss rather than forcing a military loss. This worked for the West also as they didn't want to involve their direct military which is why they extended a "peaceful" option for ending the cold war. The icing on the cake was Gorbachev was an intelligence asset (someone linked evidence for this here once, I lost the bookmark apparently; if he wasn't then he was the only truly naive Soviet citizen).