After
World War II, the terms "real socialism" or "really existing socialism" gradually became the predominating euphemisms used as self-description of the
Eastern Bloc states' political and economical systems and their society models. As US Communist Party activist
Irwin Silber put it in 1994,The term 'actually existing socialism' is not (despite the quotation marks) a sarcasm; in fact, while obviously containing an implicit irony, the phrase itself was coined by Soviet Marxist-Leninists and was widely used by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and its supporters in polemics with those who postulated a model of socialism significantly different from the system developed in the Soviet Union. Its point was that various alternatives to the Soviet-derived model existed only in the minds of their advocates, while 'actual socialism' existed in the real world. The term was also taken up by some
dissidents, such as
Rudolf Bahro, who used it in a more critical way. == See also ==