You said this in 2 consecutive sentences. Please reconsider your position.
-- another USSRian
There's nothing to reconsider. There are people that hate how free the speech is in the US, but their efforts are largely limited to the environments where they have full cultural and administrative control over - such as certain university campuses, or online platforms they own - and once you go outside these censorship areas, your speech is free, and the government - absent occasional local stupidity outbursts routinely corrected by courts - is not able to suppress speech in any meaningful way, and the courts are determined to keep it this way.
TLDR: some people want speech not to be free in the US, but so far they fail.
You just described what's happening in the UK or Canada. Yet, I give it, neither have "free speech", but moral point remain that what happened in the USSR is happening today in the western world.
UK is a democratic country. In a democratic country, the government is elected by people, and can exist only while people support it. Not literally everybody, of course, but a significant part of people must support any government system for it to be able to function as a democratic society. By attacking the government, you offend these people and their deepest held beliefs, and imply that they are either not smart enough to figure out how the government should be, or are too lazy to go and vote for a proper government. Moreover, if you argue that a particular elected official is stupid, or corrupt, or bigoted, or criminal - you also imply people who voted for that person either are OK with these things or are too stupid to recognize them (at least if these things were known before the election). Both can be deeply offensive to people. Of course, some people would be OK with being called bigots or idiots, but many would take it as a gross offense. Similarly, calling their chosen representative such words would be possibly a less personal, but no less hurtful offense - after all, if somebody insults your friend, you'd be also hurt as if they'd have insulted you, wouldn't you? Maybe a bit less, but same goes for your representative.
Thus, it is clear that political speech can be grossly offensive. Moreover, I would go further and claim that it is more offensive than, for example, a racial insult. You do not choose your race, so if somebody insults you on the base of your race, it has very little to do with you personally - it's not directed at you as a person, but at a vague concept of race which largely exists in the mind of the speaker and nowhere else. You could shrug it off as empty words having nothing to do with you specifically. Insulting your political creed goes much deeper to the core of your identity and hurts on much more personal level - it is offending part of your identity that you yourself chose and built!
Thus, one can consider proven that criticizing the government is as much and maybe more hurtful than regular slurs and insults, and must be prosecuted at least as harshly.
(for people not watching it closely, the above is not my opinion but a demonstration how one could prove censorship of political opinions is necessary if one is allowed to censor "offensive speech").
The solution of this problem is that government should not ban any speech (with obvious and well-known exceptions, blah blah) and not be allowed to determine what is "offensive" and prosecute people for that.
As with all law, a certain amount of interpretation is unavoidable. Your example doesn't prove anything because it relies on a particular meaning of "grossly offensive" which you have contrived to make it work. It is not generally a gross offense to merely object to or question someone's beliefs. "Gross" in this sense means that the communication must be a flagrant and obvious violation of acceptable language in a tolerant society.
[0] http://merlin.obs.coe.int/iris/2006/8/article101.en.html
[1] https://research.edgehill.ac.uk/files/20207198/Bliss%20-%20C...
[2] https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/social-media-guideline...
As somebody who actually lived in the USSR I call bullshit on this. There's a huge difference between arresting people for saying something the powers don't like and restricting business links to certain aggressive dictatorial regimes. True, many citizens of those regimes suffer twice - once because they live under a dictatorial regime and second time because of the effect of economic sanctions. And it is true that economic sanctions disrupt free flow of information and trade. They are a kind of warfare but one where people don't get killed - which is not good, all warfare is bad, but better than the other kind.
It is bad when there is a war between two countries. It is worse when the government wages war on its people, and that what happened in the USSR. It is nothing like what is happening in the US. Nowhere in the US you can be arrested or imprisoned for saying anything - including praising USSR, Russia, Putin, ayatollas, Hezbollah, whatever you like.
> The US doesn't yet have massive prison camp systems full of political dissidents
"Yet" is extremely disingenuous here - there's absolutely no indication US is anywhere close to have it, on the contrary, US has the strongest free speech laws among all developed countries, and the high courts consistently reject any attempt to change that. In fact, what I am hearing every day is how there's too much free speech and how it should be suppressed and restricted for my own good, lest I read something wrong and get offended.
> but then, for the first couple of decades, neither did the USSR.
Technically might be true, if you say reduce first couple of decades to first decade - Gulag started in 1929. But not because the bolsheviks were kind of heart - before, they just murdered whoever they considered the enemy of the people (or, in rare cases, kicked them out of the country). After Stalin came to power, he realized there's a lot of work to be done and he can't use the capitalist way of paying people for the work, and if he just keeps killing everybody there would be nobody left to do his grand projects. So he used the other way - put people in prison and force to work (of course, he still killed plenty but some were spared for prison camps). Even Soviet space program and nuclear program was done by people who were effectively prisoners (word to look for is "sharashka").