history

I'd agree generally. One of the most difficult obstacles for global communists to overcome in the last century is that Stalin tied the project of building communism (globally) with the national interests of the USSR. A lot of communists obviously didn't feel very comfortable with letting internationalism take a back seat to just always supporting Moscow and let the capitalists do the whole "reds are traitors who want to sell out their nation" propaganda a lot more effectively. The Sino-Soviet Split is another example of this, where Russian national interests won out over international solidarity.

Though about Bukharin, I can't say for sure how things would have turned out if he and the Right Opposition came out on top in the power struggle. I really like Bukharin personality, he seems like a good guy, smart too. Things like collectivization would have been more "relaxed" under him than Stalin definitely, and he probably would have been able to just bribe the peasant kulaks into cooperating rather than going full class liquidation on them like Stalin. I bet Bukharin economy would have likely been really impressive if it was allowed time and space to develop since he seemed to understand in a Marxist sense that Russia didn't get the benefit of prior capitalist accumulation and could do more to address that than just brute forcing the problem with massive, labor-intensive projects like Stalin did (with terrible health and safety regulations as well)

The major issue is that you still have the fuckin Nazi invasion happening in the 1940s, and without Stalin's aggressive campaign of industrialization it's possible a Bukharinist USSR just gets rolled over and genocided if that slower paced industrialization campaign means a weaker war economy. Things got pretty close a few times even with a hard ass like Stalin in charge. Plus to be fair in that global situation, stoking nationalism against foreign invaders does make sense even if it's not strictly communist.

That's one of the modern arguments modern Russians like to use to defend Stalin at least. They say "Bukharin would have dragged out collectivization until the 1950s, so we would have lost the Great Patriotic War and all died." But whose to say WW2 even goes the same way with Bukharin running things. It's possible Bukharin's more "lenient" leadership could have convinced the west to actually negotiate collective security agreement against Nazi Germany in good faith. Then the Nazis could be stopped at Sudetenland if something like the Franco-Soviet Mutual Assistance Treaty was taken seriously.

historical possibilities of that period of time are really fascinating