The Stalinist regime was certainly a state capitalist regime. The apparatchiks, state managers and so on tightly controlled the state and thus constituted the de facto Soviet capitalist class who collectively owned state industries. The lavish lifestyles of these rich bourgeois parasite - a number of whom were exceeding rich indeed - was a world away from the oppression and poverty suffered by ordinary workers. The vast majority of the population were wage slaves. Wage labour implies capital as Marx pointed out and therefore capitalism. Socialism is the complete absence of wage labour , money and the market (a synonym for communism in classical marxism)as some of the early Bolsheviks like Bukharin acknowleged before Lenin came along and twisted the meaning of the word socialism to equate it with state capitalism. Stalin only built on the inherently authoritarian state capitalist model that Lenin introduced, he did not represent that sharp a break from what preceded him as some on the Left, particualry the Trots , like to pretend. It is the whole rotten corpus of Leninist ideology and all its offshoots that workers need to throw off once and for all if we are ever to make progress towards a real communist world