Rigorous, Marxist research. Please do not take this as a request for you to show me anti-communist literature.

So that's a roundabout way of saying "no, nothing will change my mind". Good to know and this will be the last time I will respond to you, so I will point out the stupidity of some of your statements.

It depends what you mean by ‘the opposite’. I think you have misunderstood what I’m saying. I’m not claiming that everybody liked the USSR. So ‘the opposite’ is not me accepting that some people disliked the USSR. I already know they didn’t and I’m not denying it. I’m saying their view must be put into context, treated to analysis, and understood as a class-based perspective.

Here you're twisting what I said to say nothing. The opposite of "Estonia did not want to be in the union and couldn't willing leave it" is that "Estonia wanted to be in the union and could willing leave it". You're just going off on a tangent to not address the point.

More stories about people surviving and living normal lives in the USSR, even if they disliked the USSR, suggests the opposite of what you think it does.

Some people can also live a normal life under imperialistic sphere of the US, even if they dislike US. Does that mean it suggests the opposite of your understanding of the US, and by extension capitalism? That capitalism isn't bad?

It suggests that not all dissidents were sent to Siberia it treated badly.

I know, some were shot on sight, others we're sent to jail to rot. The ones who lived had to keep their nose down to survive.

More stories about this or that SSR that wanted to leave but ‘couldn’t’, suggests the exact opposite of what you claim. If it’s proof of anything, given that we know that the USSR ended and that e.g. the Baltics are no longer in the USSR, it proves that SSRs could leave.

So you believe the SSRs could leave the union because the union stopped existing? By the time those countries could actually vote themselves out of the union the collapse was already inevitable. You acknowledge there was dissent and desire to leave and that's where my question was, why couldn't they leave before. But you're not interested in answering that because that doesn't suit the idyllic vision you have of the soviet union.

I hold that the USSR was still a success because it’s achievements are uncountable. Soviets turned the most backwards country in Europe into the world’s second most powerful superpower in one generation, all without colonialism.

Guess Nazi Germany was also a success in your book. They turned a crumbling nation into something that was an existential threat even to the USSR, all in one generation, no colonialism and only at fraction of the size of the union.

Then they liberated the rest of Europe and Asia (supporting China, DPRK, Laos, and Vietnam) from brutal Nazis, fascists, and colonialists.

With the significant help of the good old capitalist America. USSR probably wouldn't have survived the Nazi invasion if not for lend-lease program from America. In Khrushchev memoirs he mentions that Stalin himself said that USSR wouldn't have won without the help from America. The USSR didn't do this liberation on their own and they couldn't have done it without America.

Then they helped liberate much of Africa and parts of Latin America from the same brutal, murderous, terror regimes of western imperialists. There is nothing you could ever say to me that will make me think these were bad things. And I have only scratched the surface of foreign policy.

I never said they were bad things. But Mr "nuanced and balanced view" here should be able to see how not everything the union did was good just as everything the US does is bad, as I just pointed out US is the reason the USSR didn't lose to Nazi Germany. As is stands their actions in other parts of the world don't invalidate how they oppressed the Baltic states.

Nevermind near universal suffrage, education, housing, healthcare, employment, etc, at home. All at a time when the ‘advanced civilisations’ were raping and looting the world to strengthen the west, while their domestic populations didn’t have anything close to universal education, housing, employment, healthcare, suffrage, etc. And did everything that people criticise the USSR for but on a much greater and more violent scale.

Whataboutism.

What would make you realise that implying that a Union of hundreds of million people, that defeated the Nazis, supported anti-colonial movements, and spanning 70 years, didn’t do a single thing right?

Twisting my words again. Never did I say they didn't do a single thing right. I was simply pointing out the hypocrisy of saying the other SSRs were free and democratic, they weren't.

But it's not like you're going to change you mind anyway so feel free to live in your contradictions that you're going to ignore so you could believe the lies you want to believe.