Are there valid successful Socialist States?

That question seems be a key dividing issues in the modern American online Left's factional infighting.  And like many such fights few are willing to actually bring any nuance to the conversation.  On the one side are people insisting Socialism has still never been tried (which includes Anarchists who think a benevolent state is not even hypothetically possible).  Then you have your MLs who think criticizing any state or party with a claimed Leninist lineage "serves imperialism".

For States in existence today I consider both Cuba and Vietnam legitimate examples of successful Socialist experiments.  Their societies still aren't perfect, under the model of Socialism they're going for the "higher phase" won't be possible till the entire world is Communist.  But they are still Revolutions that have improved the conditions of their working class and are not guilty of most of the crimes the western media seeks to level against them.  And I'm willing to say the same of Eva Morales in Bolivia.

However Modern China and North Korea are Fascist Ethno-States, Mao may have been legit, but China as it is now is an authoritarian Ethno-State.  The Baath Party and Fatah parties are also Fascist parties.  Caleb Maupin doesn't even limit his apologetics to dictators claiming to Communists, he even defends Nasser, a Green Shirt who hired multiple high ranking SS Officers and banned Egypt's Communist Party, Khrushchev asked him to unban it but he refused.  There is a video on YouTube of a speech where Nasser sounds like he's defending Socialism, but it's the same wishy washy abstract "socialism" you get from Social Democrats calling them Democratic Socialists.

Maupin also spreads this "color revolution" narrative, seeking to discredit Left Wing resistance movements within States he likes by pointing to their CIA backing.  Empires like the US will often back revolutionary movements within enemy nations simply to cause instability, even though the ideologies of those groups are ones they will also be opposing if they take power.  That does not discredit those movements as legitimately Leftist.  Because guess what, you can pull that same card on Lenin himself, Lenin was only able to get back to Russia in 1917 because of the assistance he got from the Kaiser.  The CIA may very well also wind up backing a revolution they shouldn't have.

So that leads me to finally talking about the USSR.  I believe that the Russian Revolution should have went a different route, the Socialist Revolutionary Party I think had the right ideas for Russia given how much Russia was still Feudal and Agrarian unlike the Industrialized states Marx and Engels were mainly thinking of when they wrote their theories.  The Left SRs would have handled the Kulak situation differently.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to demonize Lenin or even Stalin, in fact I disagree with separating them, whatever Stalin did you object to Lenin would have probably done the same.  And if anything Stalin was better since he ended the state persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is actually one of George Orwell's criticisms of Stalin expressed in Animal Farm.  They did make Russia better, much of what's said to vilify them are lies, but they did do things I feel they shouldn't have.

As far as the Holodomor goes, I do believe the Kulak situation should have been handled differently, but calling it a Genocide is absurd.  Under the Tsars Russia had a famine about every decade, Socialists don't claim they can magically make the conditions that cause Famines disappear, none the less after having three Famines in the first 35 years of Bolshevik rule Russia had none between the end of WWII in 1945 and Gorbachev's Neo-Liberal reforms in 1985.  40 years of no Famine is considering Russia's material conditions absolutely impressive.