Edit for clarity: I'm not asking why the Tankie/Anarchist grudge exist. I'm curious about what information sources - mentors, friends, books, TV, cultural osmosis, conveys that information to people. Where do individuals encounter this information and how does it become important to them. It's an anthropology question about a contemporary culture rather than a question about the history of leftism.
I've been thinking about this a bit lately. Newly minted Anarchists have to learn to hate Lenin and Stalin and whoever else they have a grudge against. They have to encounter some materials or teacher who teaches them "Yeah these guys, you have to hate these guys and it has to be super-personal like they kicked your dog. You have to be extremely angry about it and treat anyone who doesn't disavow them as though they're literally going to kill you."
Like there's some process of enculturation there, of being brought in to the culture of anarchism, and there's a process where anarchists learn this thing that all (most?) anarchists know and agree on.
Idk, just anthropology brain anthropologying. Cause like if someone or something didn't teach you this why would you care so much?
As an anarchist, how it went for me:
Read history. Have intimate relationships with at least two tankies (all my relationships end badly, so its a sure way to build a grudge).
Marx was cool though (sometimes), and I've got some ml comrades who are doing pretty much the right thing, and most importantly: I'd rather be murdered by my hot problematic ex in a few years than some shitty nazi tomorrow. So if there are firing squads for the anarchists, my last wish is that one of my exes do mine, please.
If I get my way, you guys can run the trains.
If none of this makes sense, read some less myopic history. The USSR was unquestionably better than the czarist regime, by a lot, and it was the worst most reactionary group of communists kind of giving communism a bad name by being generally shitty about being bare minimum decent¹. Also the bolsheviks killing all the other communists, not just the anarchists. Yes they moved Russia, technologically, farther in their short life than basically any civilization in history, but they did it by shitting on the core ideas of communism for some peripheral crap Marx said was 'probably a thing you need sometjing like to get there, I think'. There's an opportunity cost thing, and I'll give them more understanding, but they do not get a full pass for bad behavior just because they were communist. What's the incident where the term 'tankie' was born? Remember that one?
Yes they were better than the other world powers, but by as little as they could get away with while still calling themselves communist, like they relished the misery, fetishized the sacrifices, and frequently missed the god damn point. They ruled for a people they weren't willing to trust or like, a lesson robespierre had already fucking taught us, and that poisoned the idea of communism, or at least the word, for a lot of people. Thats why I still have to call myself an anarchist instead of an anarcho-communist if I want to turn libs.
¹which, yes, set the entire rest of the world against them. They had a few teeeensy difficulties. They still used it as a license to be otherwise just as awful as everyone else, and handled their problems in utterly deplorable ways.
To be absolutely clear, the poor and lackluster decisions and retreats from "pure" Marxism and Leninism were by far the result of material conditions over a personal desire for power. The USSR was the world's first socialist experiment and thus went on to make mistakes which would be corrected by later socialist experiments which would survive the 90s, but many of those things were forced by the invasion of 14 imperialist powers and the genocidal war campaign of the Nazis shortly after.
The history of Marxism (from the Marxist perspective) can be seen as legitimately taking the most successful form of liberatory thought and action in the modern day and trying to make it continually work in the cruel world we're born into. It's not perfect, but it's been shown to work on a scale larger than any other strain of thought, and socialist revolutions have fed more children who'd gone hungry before than anything else prior or after.
For more context in this worldview, I highly recommend Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti and Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo
You can't think if any others? Not one?
Everything else you said I addressed in my statement. Refer back to it.
Which socialist projects do you hold in higher regard?
In fairness, the USSR was the first Marxist experiment. There were other socialist experiments before that, most important to us being the Paris Commune.
There were a whole lot of weird utopian socialist cults in America. Like Oenida silverware started out as a utopian sex cult.
Most of them. Different criticisms, but generally; most of them.
China hasn't counted for decades; opposing America is not a defining component of socialism. It's just a generally cool thing to do.
But my primary concern is not states and authorities; they dont generally interest me.
Okay, why do you hold, for example, Vietnam in higher regard than the USSR? Why do you consider Angola to be better than the USSR? Why the early PRC over the USSR?
Also, surely you don't hold the pogrom-loving Makhno's territories in higher regard, do you?