I remember watching Richard Wolff's "Let's Talk About Socialism" as a pivotal moment of "oh maybe it isn't terrible." Nowadays I'd probably say that lecture is mediocre, cause IIRC he was kinda downplaying the USSR's accomplishments and advocating for worker co-ops or something. But at the time it was a solid pipeline moment to get me to reconsider. For a time after that, I was into "libertarian socialism," which basically meant that I thought AES states were too top down and that we were going to do it differently by being more bottom up or something.
I think reading State and Revolution was the real turning point away from that, where Lenin kinda lays out the blueprint for AES states and it became a lot more clear what all the terms mean and why people practicing it did the stuff that they did. I still had a lot more growing to do after that though and do to this day. But this place helped me transform from "I'm probably ML" to "I don't see any proven alternative to ML." And helped me transform from "I don't quite understand what states like Russia are doing, it's confusing" to "imperialism is the primary contradiction and critical support for anti-imperialist states."
This place also helped me understand dialectical and historical materialism better. It's still something that slides off my brain a bit, but I think that's just from not enough actual application of it.
