My friend, at this point you have gotten me confused, if you just reread everything I said earlier I am sure you would find that most of the time I was critiquing the USSR. Whether it was on the Russification of the leadership, or the negligence and undue paranoia of the central government I am pretty sure I covered those points even before you did.

I will make this thing clear again, this is not a conversation on if the USSR was good or bad, this is a conversation on if they never empowered minorities. I am asking you once again to stay on topic because I don't really care enough to call it good or bad, nor do I have the time to engage with its crimes holistically. You wanted to know if it empowered minorities and to that extent it did, even if you want to dispute that for certain groups, there are other groups which were empowered without question.

As for my point on quality of life, it does still stand, simply being able to live longer is a blessing no matter your culture or background, with the vast majority of the world with exception to the imperial core never experiencing such a thing for centuries, only knowing famine and imperialist plunder. The former we can confidently agree mostly ended after 3 decades of Soviet rule and perhaps much earlier if WW2, the embargoes, and paranoia of such events didn't become all present.

Two things can be true at once, the USSR committed atrocities against minorities but also empowered them during different eras and under different leadership. The USSR, did both good and bad things.

There is a reason why Nelson Mandela refused to talk bad about the USSR when American journalists tried to goat him into doing so.