That states had to react to threats from the US never crosses their mind. The whole dissolution of the USSR and subsequent pillaging played out on the nightly news for years and I’ve never met a liberal that remembers it. They do vaguely remember that the USSR had an aggressive security state but can’t ever understand why.
Oh, it would be way worse, because communism is always way worse.
There’s still a lot of people that came of age in the USSR. They’re very interesting to talk to. Often, their experience doesn’t match the American anticommunist rhetoric.
The bourgeoisie cannibalised Russia. Liberals from the west insisted that Russia and the rest of the Soviet republics would be ruled by the bourgeoisie. This was the whole point of the Cold War. At huge expense to its own citizenry the west conducted a series of proxy wars and led an arms race to make it as difficult as possible for workers to control their own destiny.
As expected, false scarcity and extreme inequality followed, and to justify or explain this inequality, the bourgeoisie used from the usual ethnic and sexual minority scapegoats. With your weird understanding of history, you’re obviously American, so none of this should be hard to understand. You have people dying on the streets, the government won’t even raise the minimum wage, but the news about the evils of Mexicans, blacks, trans people, etc. never stops.