I think their point is that the repression that you're discussing is largely pre-Krushchev; that's not quite a century ago, but it's a world away from what life in the USSR was like by the 1980s.

Krushchev successor, Brezhnev send tanks to Czechoslovakia in 1968.

And the US successfully overthrew inconvenient governments in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Congo in 1960, the Dominican Republic in 1961, Chile and South Vietnam in 1963, and Brazil in 1964, but you wouldn't call that evidence for the US being a repressive government, would you?

The US is a powerful nation that imposes its will by force on other nations and is indifferent to the interests of those it subjects to its will.

This has been true for a long time and remains true now much like Russias nature.