You say you're a bit of a history buff on the USSR.
Historians aren't immune to the prevailing, dominant views of the ruling classes of the societies in which they live. They have their own biases and prejudices from the personal experiences of their lives, and which inform their decisions to research various particular aspects of history, what to focus on, what to disregard, what is deemed worthy and important for investigation, and peer-review isn't foolproof. Like all of us, they're trapped by the particularities of their lives. Their work can't be removed from their backgrounds.
Two of the more well-known in the last century were Richard Pipes and Moshe Lewin. Both had experience of genocidal Nazi violence, but their paths went in different directions. Pipes went westward to the US, Lewin earlier in life went east to the USSR, to escape the extermination that befell his family in occupied Poland/Lithuania. Pipes served in the US airforce, Lewin in the Red Army. Pipes' views on the Soviet Union were coloured by the threat posed by a predating Russian imperialism to Poland and informed his research into the origins of the Russian (Muscovite) state. Lewin's views were coloured by his experience within the USSR, and the system that literally saved him was also one he would eventually look at with a critical but hopeful eye.
Both looked at state politics, and both had useful insights to glean from their work. Pipes was also an elitist who had little interest in the lives of the masses and their significance to historical processes, he became a belligerent advisor in the US government and CIA, but underneath his anti-Communism was a distinctly Polish understanding of the Russian state and the centuries-old threat it posed. Because of that bias narrowing his interest, and while also acknowledging his political views, his contribution to understanding the formation and development of the Russian state the Communists later seized control of are worthwhile.
Lewin looked at the state-driven modernisation processes the USSR (and its relations with the broad masses) underwent during the Stalin era, which would inform his research into alternative paths that might've been taken or still could be taken, from old economic and political debates within and without the party before Stalin's policies of accelerated industrial development. Lewin was no fan of Stalinism but recognised its dynamism and also saw how unsustainable it was without the use of coercion. The Soviet Union was a flawed experiment that didn't have to become what it did.
When you say with arrogant self-regard, the USSR 'was like this,' who said it first? Why did they say it? What was it that informed their decision to investigate that thing in the first place, what had an important mediating influence on them?
STALIN BAD MAN.
shrugs
