Was the USSR and the Eastern Bloc socialist?

In 1991 the USSR collapsed after its East European satellite states had first been overthrown in revolutions, bourgeois revolutions. That year has been described as the end of the “short twentieth century”, an “epoch of wars and revolutions” running from 1914-1991. It was a turning-point in world history, and one which obliged socialists everywhere, including those most hostile to Stalinism, to re-evaluate and reorient.