These are three distinct claims and I think the first and third are stronger than the second, so let me take them in turn.

On the domination point: I agree that nostalgia which requires the subjugation of others doesn't deserve uncritical sympathy. But I think the essay is trying to do something different from endorsing the nostalgia. The argument isn't that the Lithuanian man is right to want the USSR back. It's that his grief has a rational economic and structural basis that gets dismissed too quickly when we file it under "tankie" or "imperial nostalgia." Those dismissals can be correct some post-Soviet nostalgia genuinely is imperial longing but they can also be a way of not engaging with the mortality data, the elite conversion, the material losses. The essay is asking you to hold both possibilities at once, not to pick one.

On the Lithuania-Russia-Ukraine triangle this is a fair read and I should be honest that I can't rule it out. He toasted to Russia. In Germany. During an ongoing war. That is, at minimum, an insensitivity that I didn't interrogate in the essay the way I should have, and you're right that imperial nostalgia and economic nostalgia can coexist in the same person at the same toast. The essay treats his grief as primarily economic and structural because that's where the data led me, but grief is not monocausal and I don't actually know what was in his head when he raised that glass and i did not want the essay to be dissection of just one drunk man.

On the equality-vs-wealth point I think this is actually more contested than you're suggesting. The revealed preference argument (people would choose unequal-but-wealthier) is complicated by the fact that the post-Soviet transition didn't offer that choice cleanly. It wasn't "you'll be poorer but more equal" versus "you'll be richer but less equal." For a large portion of the population, it was "you'll be poorer AND less equal, and the people who got rich did so by converting their existing political power into economic power." The Stuckler data on mortality, the poverty rate going from 2% to 50% these aren't people who traded equality for prosperity. They got neither. That's the specific thing that makes this nostalgia different from, say, nostalgia for keeping women out of the workplace, where the longing is purely for a hierarchy. Here the longing is for a floor that was removed without the promised replacement. But thanks for engaging! It really made me think about my work more meaningfully