It's not just the optics that are bad.

Azov battalion

What "communist dictator" are you talking about?

How is that different than any functioning state?

What does totalitarian mean?

That states had to react to threats from the US never crosses their mind. The whole dissolution of the USSR and subsequent pillaging played out on the nightly news for years and I've never met a liberal that remembers it. They do vaguely remember that the USSR had an aggressive security state but can't ever understand why.

Oh, it would be way worse, because communism is always way worse.

There's still a lot of people that came of age in the USSR. They're very interesting to talk to. Often, their experience doesn't match the American anticommunist rhetoric.

I don't care about antisemitic noblemen. His book is fake, and he's lucky he wasn't killed.

The bourgeoisie cannibalised Russia. Liberals from the west insisted that Russia and the rest of the Soviet republics would be ruled by the bourgeoisie. This was the whole point of the Cold War. At huge expense to its own citizenry the west conducted a series of proxy wars and led an arms race to make it as difficult as possible for workers to control their own destiny.

As expected, false scarcity and extreme inequality followed, and to justify or explain this inequality, the bourgeoisie used from the usual ethnic and sexual minority scapegoats. With your weird understanding of history, you're obviously American, so none of this should be hard to understand. You have people dying on the streets, the government won't even raise the minimum wage, but the news about the evils of Mexicans, blacks, trans people, etc. never stops.

Now, just out of the blue, for no discernable reason, the Russian government decided it would just go ahead and conquer a large population in a land where it would have to fight an insurgency for approximately forever. Yes, this is definitely what's happening. A tankie might call this pure MSNBC brain, but there is literally nothing else you need to know in order to understand this conflict. Stay strong, and continue to be the smartest person in the room.

What is "authoritarianism"?

Is that when a handful of capital owners get to decide what we do with all of our productive resources?