I also agree that you can make the point the USSR wasn't socialist, but that was also not what I was arguing for. (Spoiler: I describe the USSR as "state socialist")

I was arguing against calling the USSR capitalist, even state capitalist, and I stand by it.

the desire to use the words by their meaning

Capitalism is defined through private (not personal) property -- There was no private property. I think that should be enough to dismiss the notion the USSR was capitalist in amy capacity. But it also lacked competitive markets, "free" price systems and a ubiquitous profit motive, finance capital and certainly more characteristics.

Regarding the ownership of the means of production: I already agreed with you that it was not owned by the workers. However, being state owned, it was public ownership. You can say that isn't totally fair to you bc the name implies a level of participation of the people in the state which wasn't there, but their collective interests still somewhat mattered where today rules the profit motive (i.e. housing). That is not to say that planning, production and distribution did not fail the people often, they certainly did.

Since we were also talking about intent to build up a socialist system: When you look at it in the early days when it started out as a soviet republic, with worker soviets sending delegates to parent soviets cascading and culminating into the supreme soviet, the idea certainly was to create a state with (if not control then) direct expression of the workers interests. In that sense state ownership would be justified much more. This is also what has led me to call the system "state socialism".

The soviet union did definitively degrade hence I concede that it is well possible that initial intent to build socialism did not exist in late stage USSR leadership, I don't know much about that, to be honest and if that is what you experienced as a child I believe you.

But that this intent drove the initial conception should be obvious or do you think the writings of Lenin/Stalin and the internationals were all a big charade to get to power?

The degradation of the USSR, the communist party specifically, is one point why I mentioned the soviet union is an example to learn from. I believe Maoists have derived from that the principle of self-revolution within the party.

In the end to rationally learn from it is the important part, as long as we can do that it isn't important how its economic system is called or even if it was "good" or "evil" or whatever. And while I have opinions they honestly aren't always strongly held, as there is a lot to learn. Its just a mechanism of online discussions and them being overwhelmingly bad-faithed that brings that out