We could have ended communism much quicker by just inviting Soviet leaders to the USA and letting them randomly drive around, visiting stores, farms and other businesses.
My late mother worked briefly at the United Nations in the 1950s. Her contacts there got in touch with her after she had moved to Tennessee to tell her that a Soviet delegation was visiting Nashville (late 1960s, perhaps) and instructing her to give them a driving tour of the city.
They wanted to see slums and only slums. She took them to the worst parts of Nashville, Jo Johnston projects, and others like it, and the Soviets were outraged that she was showing them only middle class housing. They wanted to see where the truly poor lived. She could not convince them that this was as bad as it got.
Khrushchev anyone?
No, you have to remember that generationally the early communist were simply evil. There were no good commies for those what if scenarios no matter what the delusions of the useful idiots: Lenin opened the gulags and Trotsky did his part to help fill them.
Yeltsin was part of a younger generation who couldn’t shelter himself from socialism’s failings by living in the West the way someone like Sanders can.
But the Left has moved on from thinking socialism will bring about prosperity to hating prosperity and thinking socialism will do things like save Mother Earth and keep humans in their place.