and largely a result of Gorbachev’s privatization and liberalization policies

And Lenin’s and Stalin’s policies of State capitalism and abolition of communism as practiced by the soviets since early 1917. Lenin and his fellow psychopath Trotsky are the ones who truly ruined any hope of communism in Russia by producing a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in which a new class of rulers watched over workers for whom life conditions barely changed, which is arguably not a “stateless, classless society” (what communism is about).