Pivotal

Olympic narrative:

'I'm sorry, did NBC's intro to Russia just call 70+ years of communist imposed human misery a "pivotal experiment"? DVR rewind say, "yep".'

A pivotal experiment
in dictatorial merriment!

What work is "pivotal" doing in that phrase? Is the idea that after running the experiment, the world pivoted away from the socialist hypothesis? There's some truth to that, but it was certainly a slow-motion "pivot", since, as the quotation above mentions, the experiment in Russia was allowed to run for decades after very early signs of fatal failure.

I gather it's bad manners to bring up those fatalities.

The guinea pigs were starved and shot,
but now let's hope that's all forgot.