Can someone explain to me what "Communism in 20 years" meant? Wasn't the Soviet Union already supposed to be communist?

The CPSU claimed the USSR was transitioning from socialism to communism in its 1961 program. In practice that largely meant trying to outperform the foremost capitalist economy (the US) and promoting "communist self-government" (i.e. transferring activities from the state and courts to voluntary activity by citizens and by public organizations like trade unions.)

In that sense yeah, it ought to be possible, but it's probably a good idea to shy away from such talk (as the CPSU itself did under Brezhnev) since the transition to communism will clearly be a much longer and more complex process, whereas under Khrushchev Soviet officialdom was proclaiming that the prerequisites for communism would exist by 1980.

Thanks

How is this new to you? You do realise that the Bolsheviks used to be the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party before rebranding as the All-Russian and later All-Union Communist Party right?

No, I didn't know that.

hownew.ru

I'm not a Marxist, I just come here to ask questions.

If you want answers from a guy that has read a fuckton of books and even scans them you can go to /marx/

Okay, thanks

Well ask away i guess, but we do have an active thread for this sort of thing here

Communism is the goal, not a thing to be ushered in instantly. .pdf related is a decent introductory read to the concept of the different stages of a communist society, if a little wordy for someone who might not be used to reading Marx.

Back in the day the stages were referred to as "lower" and "higher" stage communism, but by Lenin's time the accepted usage was "socialism" for the lower stage and "communism" for the higher stage. The USSR was socialist by this metric, but it had not yet reached communism. In light of this, then, >>2837460's quote is a little misleading since it was written by Lenin pre-socialism, in 1918. Full context can be found here, under the heading "The Present-Day Economy Of Russia": marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/apr/21.htm

The truth is that no "communist" nation ever claimed to have achieved communism. That's largely a Western notion because people in the West donm't know what communism is in the way that even the commonfolk in Russia or China did.
Therefore most "communist" nations claimed that they were "building socialism" which was just around the corner. This is even confirmed by anti-socialist activist Yuri Bezmenov.

Just because your governing party is called the communist part doesn't make it communism.