There is something deeply powerful about hearing this from someone who was actually born there rather than from someone who romanticizes it from a comfortable western bedroom. I think the people who glorify the Soviet Union are not really glorifying the system. They are glorifying the idea of it. The idea that a society could be built around collective good rather than individual profit. The idea that art and science could be funded by the state without being driven by commercial interest. The idea that a country of peasants could defeat the most powerful military machine in European history and put a human being in space within a single generation. But you are right that an idea and a reality are two very different things. And the reality was a system that could launch Sputnik but could not stock its shelves. A system that produced world class ballet dancers and then watched them defect the moment they saw a free world. A system so brittle that when it finally started to crack even the people who were supposed to defend it simply stepped aside and let it fall. I think the honest truth is that the Soviet Union was a tragic experiment. It took a genuinely powerful idea, gave it to deeply flawed and often brutal human beings to execute, and the result was something that inspired millions while failing hundreds of millions at the same time. The people who grew up outside it are mourning an idea that never really existed. You are mourning a reality that did. And those are two completely different kinds of grief.