Real socialism

real socialism, also known as really existing socialism, revolutionary socialism, revolutionary socialism, authentic socialism or developed socialism, is a term used to describe a post- and anti-capitalist political and economic system which is understood as a socialist transition that aims to reach communism or anarchism, was used during the rule of Joseph Stalin, of Enver Hoxha, the anarchist revolution in Kurdistan, in the Soviet Union and in the Eastern Bloc countries.

After World War II, the terms "real socialism" or "actually existing socialism" they gradually became the predominant euphemisms used as a self-description of the political and economic systems of the Eastern Bloc states and their models of society. De jure, often referred to as "people's (democratic) republics," these states were governed by a communist party, some of which were governed autocratically and had adopted a form of planned economy and propagated socialism and/or communism as its ideology. As Communist Party activist Irwin Silber put it in 1994,

The term "actually existing socialism" is not (in spite of quotation marks) a sarcasm; in fact, although it obviously contains an implicit irony, the phrase itself was coined by Soviet Marxists-Leninists and was widely used by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (PCUS) and its polemic supporters with whom they postulated a significantly different model of socialism from the system developed in the Soviet Union. His point was that several alternatives to the model derived from the Soviet Union existed only in the minds of their defenders, while "real socialism" existed in the real world.