Not sure if it's just me, but I feel like the moment Lenin and co fucked over the Russian people and instituted Bolshevism and called it "Communism", the moral legitimacy of all flavours of Communism began to evaporate amongst the mass of people, especially in the West (so called). This has meant that any attempt to convince regular folk of the legitimacy of alternative models of communism (eg. Anarcho-Communism) was a virtual non-starter.
Accompanying this was a cast of Western intellectuals (and activists) who attached themselves to national CP's or Trotskyist/Leninist/Maoist groups that sought to dismiss or scapegoat the dictatorial aspects of so called Communist regimes (Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc) and supported their 'vanguardist' methodologies in order to 'create a revolution'.
All the while the Western capitalist class and their media wing was loving watching all these figures flying the flags of totalitarian regimes or quoting Lenin or Mao or whoever. It was the easiest propaganda campaign in history: You want socialism? look at the USSR - that's socialism! No democracy, police state, no right to protest, etc. Don't take our word for it, look at all these intellectuals joining the CP's; they think it's socialism too!
This essentially fortified the public's mind against capitalist alternatives or left wing economics. Two things that have been sorely lacking over the past 40-50 years.
Anyway, I'm not sure if its clear what my point is, but this is something that has been nagging at me for a while.
TL;DR: I blame the Lenin's Bolshevism for the failure of socialism (let alone Anarchism) to get any traction in the general population and has enabled the corporate media's hundred year "red-scare" campaign of decrying anything mildly left wing as "socialism" (i.e. the socialism of Bolshevik Russia).
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