I'll concede on this point, the communist party and intelligentsia aren't necessarily equivalent, though the intelligentsia did make up the largest organized bloc within the party.

I don't personally see a problem with the government largely being made up of educated people.

Party membership in the US is open to all US citizens with some exceptions. Some states even have open primaries allowing non-party members to vote. This system is flawed and is in some ways a facade since the parties are not legally required to hold primaries, but this particular element of the US political system is more democratic than the Soviet system.

There is some truth to this, yes, but we have to consider historical context. The US is in a fundamentally different geopolitical position than the USSR ever was, the USSR was under constant threat.

CPSU members make up a privileged class because they occupy a higher position in a state sanctioned social hierarchy. It represents a controlled social stratification, enacted ostensibly for the common good. I see this as a sort of paternalistic distrust of the proletariat as a whole by a subset of it.

Yes and no. They made up a more privledged subsection, yes, but this does not make it a class. The Means of Production were collectively owned, and managed via elected officials and Soviets. The Soviet system was more democratic with respect to what you could vote for, even if it was less democratic in other ways.

I'll note here that Anarchism doesn't necessarily state that people cannot have it better or worse either. Anarchism primarily positions itself as opposition to the centralization of power which can lead to social stratification, but differences in standard of living are allowable insofar as it is not a condition imposed upon one by another.

I'm aware of what Anarchism espouses, but given that we haven't seen much example of actually existing Anarchism, we are left with unstable Revolutionary periods, such as in Catalonia, or in Enclaves like Communes.

I am in full agreement here, though I would argue that this was achieved at a cost to personal freedoms (i.e. censorship and political persecution). Innocents were harmed in order to preserve the centralization of power in the hands of the communist party. I won't go so far as to say the evils outweighed the good that was done, only that they were not necessary and ultimately led to contradiction and collapse.

All governments censor, all governments persecute political opponents, or remove the conditions that allow them. Given, again, the historical context of the USSR, these were unfortunate necessities for much of its existence.

I do disagree on centralization leading to collapse, this was one aspect of the USSR that worked remarkably well. The USSR didn't really "collapse," it was killed off from within. I would argue that secluding themselves only partially from the rest of the world and slightly liberalizing until it became very liberalized towards the end marked the shift towards more bourgeois corruption.