me_irl

Nah, USSR discarded socialism and communism the moment Lenin decided he didn't like losing the elections, and Stalin made it worse for decades. There's nothing anti-communist in calling out an authoritarian dictatorship for what it was.

During the Soviet times there were repeated attempts to homogenize (as you said) all non-russian ethnicities into one big Soviet mass, easy to manage and control. Russian language, culture and values were held as the supposedly communist ideal future at the cost of national identity, replaced by pretense of representation.

Not just Holodomor, but also forced relocations of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Crimean Tatars and other Eastern European ethnicities contributed to that.

So, maybe tune down on Soviet apologia in front of people whose parents and grandparents literally had to live there.