While Gladio is a thing, and the history we are taught in Europe is colourized, it feels like you have very romanticized view of USSR.

Gulags were a thing.
So was plunder of "liberated" nations (e.g. Poland), and destruction of the individual countries culture (e.g. Polish cookbooks from before USSR occupation vs after are worlds apart).

I come from Slovakia and I have to disagree with your view that the USSR is awesome and hasn't done almost nothing bad.
After the war USSR in Czechoslovakia performed similarly imperialist things as USA did during it's history. This includes falsifying election results, banning every party except the communist. It essentially took a before free country as it's satellite.
Source

Also in 1968 In CSK began an era of liberalization, that is lifting on travel ban, enabling free speech,... The USSR saw this as us distancing from them and invaded us with army. After this they changed our government and begun the strictest era of the regime. For example: You couldn't consume ANY western culture, religion was banned. I have a friend, who illegally imported CS Lewis books, and spent time in prison for that. Source
There's an excellent movie on this called Waves (2024). I highly recommend it, cause it showcases more views on the invasion, like the soldiers, who thought that here was a fascist dictatorship.

There's many details I haven't mentioned but if you disagree I hope for meaningful conversation.

For the record, I am very much on the left and I think that both socialism and communism can work in the real world, but not like the USSR

August 1968 unrest in Czechoslovakia

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I never said the USSR didn't do anything bad. They did tons that was bad, many things that communists today study from both the perspective of "this was wrong headed and should not be repeated" like wholesale banning religion and from the perspective of "the conditions at the time were so severe, this is the best they could come up and we need to learn so we can do better" like the relocation of Koreans.

But we don't have to argue about that because what you have presented shows a lot of misunderstandings of history and political analysis that needs to be corrected before we can proceed on making judgements on any country or leader.

First off, falsifying documents is not imperialism. Banning political parties is not imperialism. Imperialism is a process value extraction by nations over nations that allows one nation to continuous acquire the value produced by another nation through structural force and use that value to maintain this exploitative structure.

Second off, "after the war" is a really critical important time period. For some reason, all the Russophobes seem to think that when the war is over then everyone should just pick up their jerseys and head home and leave the field to its own devices. War has never worked like that. The reason the USSR turned a free country into its satellite is because that free country no longer had a functioning military to defend itself and the region from further fascist/capitalist incursions. That includes lacking a counter-intelligence capacity.

And now we get to Nazis. There was absolutely a fascist movement in Czechoslovakia that lasted basically until the Nazis came in and occupied the country. And when they came in and occupied the country, they were the fascist movement in Czechoslovakia. At that point, Czechoslovakia ceased being a free country.

The Soviet liberation of Czechoslovakia has to contend with multiple threats. First, the Third Reich had purged the government and as much of society as possible of anyone with communist, trade unionist, and anti-fascist sentiments. Then they installed fascists in the administration of the country and elevated and armed pro-fascists throughout the country. This is the first problem. The Soviets couldn't just liberate and leave because they would be leaving behind a fascist power structure that would never stop trying to find ways of destroying them.

The second problem is after the war. It was clear even before the war started that the Western powers would rather have fascism than communism. Multiple attempts by Stalin to get the Western powers to stop the spread of fascism failed because the West understood fascism as an extension of capitalism and communism as the antithesis of capitalism. By the time the war is ending, the West is making this abundantly clear with their show of force nuking Japan, their occupation of Korea, the creation of the Western European Union and ultimate NATO. NATO was staffed by hand picked Nazi officers, a clear signal to the Soviets that there was no chance for real peace. Then those Nazi officers in collaboration with Western leadership planned and executed Operation Gladio which set about to connect with all the pro-fascists groups across all of Europe in an effort to organize a non-state militia movement to continue the fight against the USSR that the Nazis had advanced.

Under these conditions, the USSR could not simply leave all of the countries it has liberated as it matched to Berlin. The countries were economically devastated, their administrations had been purged of anyone remotely friendly to the USSR and violently populated with Nazis, ultranationalists, and fascists, and every country had fascists in them that were now being organized and armed by the West to continue fighting the USSR. At this point, the only option the USSR has is to take on the task of rebuilding all of these nations at every level: social, economic, and political. Anything less than this would create the conditions for violent fascist uprisings and continued war and bloodshed.

So what is there to do but use the political tools available. The USSR is a union of socialist states, with political structures for how each member state could express its own culture and localized needs and development. Unfortunately, this had never been tried at such distances and the Soviet leadership needed to come up with a way of achieving the goals of peaceful codevelopment without having the Western-most states being formally SSRs. Their solution was to ensure these states were independent but that they were heavily managed by the USSR in the social, political, economic, and military domains to prevent the emergence of fascist militias and fascist movements - things that were not only possible but were literally being actively cultivated by the West.

Religion was not banned in Czechoslovakia nor was all of Western culture. The Catholic Church was particularly targeted by the Soviets for purging from their sphere of influence and with good reason, the Vatican was the core actor in helping Nazi leadership escape the Soviet sacking of Berlin. The Vatican was relocating Nazis all over the world and the US joined them through Operation Paperclip. As the Soviets, it would be obviously suicidal to allow the unfettered operation of the vestiges of the Holy Roman Empire who were actively supporting the Third Reich and deliberately relocation their ranks with obscured histories and names. Can you imagine anyone leaving that alone on the basis of "well it's religion"?

As for C.S. Lewis, have you read his work? It's all pretty out and out Christian Nationalism. I don't blame the USSR for banning it. But all Western work was not banned. Plenty of French and Italian media was widely popular in the Soviet bloc. What you're mainly referring to is the fact that much of Anglo media was banned. And again, for good reason. The UK was the largest must brutal empire on the face of the planet. They weaponized culture in ways no one has ever done before. But they were already being ecclipsed by the USA who continued that tradition and amplified it to it's most extreme. The US was literally manipulating the art market via dark money under the direction of the CIA. Nothing is sacred to the anglosphere. They corrupted everything they touched for political purposes - religion, parenting, education, journalism, literature, music, art, theater, technology, language, politics at all levels, community organizing, etc.

The Soviets were very clear that they did not want war. But the Americans were very clear that they would do anything it took to create the conditions for more war. The Soviets were trying to build a never-before-seen society and they needed peacetime to rebuild after the devastation caused by the West. Meanwhile, the USA had been untouched by the war and was taken the post war period as a major opportunity to expand its empire. It launched a massive campaign in Korea that made Blitzkrieg look like a walk in the park. Korea, by the way, shares a border with Russia. Watching the US completely level half of an entire country after WW2 is over while the Soviets are dealing with millions dead and war-induced famine makes it very clear that the US has every intention of creating conditions for a war of devastation with the USSR.

Did the Soviet leadership do bad things? Absolutely. But were they just an evil imperialist regime that made up lies and punished people for sheer control? Absolutely not. Everything they did was based on the structure of conflict with the West and the realities of Western empire, including the thorough integration of fascism, faith, culture, economics, and politics.