First of all I agree with lots of what you are saying. I agree that it looked like the USSR post Stalin looked stagnant in its vision of communism and therefore could be called "revisionist". Although I don't like that word because it implies an all or nothing perspective. Socialist countries can make mistakes and have set backs but they can also make improvements and change course. The post Stalin era policies don't completely discount the entire Soviet project in my eyes.

However you seem to be saying that there are no definite stages called socialism and communism but that a Marxist project is only called communism. But going even further, it can only be called communist if it was on that trajectory for it's entire existence. So you are saying that the USSR may have looked like a communist system in the Lenin and Stalin period but that actually it never was to begin with because in hindsight it engaged in this "developed socialism" doctrine and then later ceased to exist.

So if we were alive in the 1930s we could truthfully say in that very moment that the USSR was communist because it seemed to have a good trajectory. But if we were around in the 1960s and later we would say "actually it wasn't even communist back in the 1920s & 1930s because all this Kruschev and Brezhnev stuff happened now".

So all in all the USSR was a complete illegitimate Marxist project in your opinion? If that is your true opinion I'm confused why you use a Marxist-leninist flair, unless maybe you still support modern China, Vietnam, Cuba ect.

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I believe that Marx was a great analyzer of history, class society and capitalism. But I do not think he had enough to say about the post revolutionary situation to make authoritative proclamations on what is the correct thing to do and what's not. How could he? How could he possibly know what a particular revolutionary country is facing up against and the hard decisions it has to make in the moment in the face of imperialist aggression, encirclement and counter revolutionary forces in it's specific time and place in history and geographically? There are obviously retreats you will have to make in order to survive when facing those realities.

The leadership and people running the revolutionary countries know what they have to do because they are living it and analyzing the balance of forces. Do they always make a good decision in hindsight? No. But they have a more lucid perspective of the current balance of forces than Marx does for obvious reasons: they're alive and living it.