In USSR, on the other hand, state-backed violence was only "save face" secret that everybody was more or less aware of. Solzhenitsyn's revelations made a much bigger splash outside of the USSR than within exactly because he didn't reveal anything most of the population wasn't already aware of - but the people themselves didn't mind that much. Even today, most Russians would say that state-sponsored violence of USSR, which affected tens of millions of people, was a good thing, and leaders who perpetrated it are still viewed favorably.
The scope of purges was such that it was impossible not to know. When the book went out, Soviet union was much safer place to live in, simply because main purge already ended. After communism fell, he was also not only one to write about these things or talk about them, bookstores were full of memoirs.
Current support for those things has a lot to do with both contemporary politics and propaganda and with the way young democracy was mishandled.
Yes, if you got the money and don't belong to the wrong group you can live quite nicely in the US of A.
https://www.livescience.com/23795-large-area-coverage-danger...
You came in complaining that the parent did not also mentioned whole history of every injustice in western world since second world war and all the good things including Tolstoy. That is not even whataboutism, that is completely changing the topic.
Lastly, if doing x in a culture y puts people at risk, people will avoid doing x and it totally have to do with the culture itself. Even if things-similar-to-x happen in different cultures for different reasons.
The very first time I visited the US a few years after German reunification after two and a half months on the road (literally) my final thought was "beautiful, but what a police state". Yes, the "free" US of A. I chose to live there later - a contradiction? Not really, it was a compromise I was willing to make, up to a point - I did return to Europe in the end when I could have stayed, a Green Card was possible.
You may not like it you morons, but even after my first 2+ months tour of the US only a few years after German reunification, so with GDR experiences very fresh, one of my most memorable conclusions about it was "what a police state".
Conveniently leaving out the experiments performed by the US military, for example, in the sixties. I chose the US because that's the most prominent anti-pole to the USSR, not because they did anything unique that no other country has done or would do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...
I don't like whataboutism as much as the next guy, but if you put on blinders to only see what fits your world view I think it's okay to put things into perspective. Humans don't always care about other humans, that was, is and will be true and has nothing to do with "communism" or whatever name you happen to despise the most.
By the way, I grew up in East Germany and participated in the protests end of the eighties, so I know quite a bit about the bad parts, but also about the good ones. I also lived in the US for nearly a decade (back in Germany now).
There are many other things one could consider, for example that now people do bad things to their own bodies as part of work culture when they go to work even though they are sick. A lot less pressure on yourself to do that in East Germany (yes, we did not produce nearly as much but I don't think it was because people actually stayed at home when they were sick). Another example, from an East German perspective the discussion about "free range kids". We were all "free range" in East Germany and often sent on our ways all alone even when still very young. Who would have thought, culture is complex and the system is only one of many variables, and regardless of the system people will be people and all kinds of stuff develops in a culture that you cannot attribute to some "system" identified by a word.