Yes, the majority of the population. Everybody wanted to go to the USSR and the Eastern Bloc in general. That is why they built the Berlin Wall and heavily guarded all the borders with Western Europe. To stop all the migrants ;) (I prefer to trust people living at that time than the nostalgia.)

I agree that it is worse in Russia now than it was in the post-Stalin Soviet era, though.

Well, I’ve also grown up in the former Eastern Bloc. So 1:1. Maybe you were part of the privileged group profiting from the Soviet imperialism? ;)

Also: Do you deny the Gulag, the oppression of all opposition, including any forms of self-organization, the Holodomor genocide, and the ethnic cleansing, e.g., of the Crimean Tatars?

Yeah, the “secret protocols dividing Eastern Europe” are a tiny, tiny detail. The UK and France decided to declare war on Germany because it was attacking independent countries. The USSR decided to join Germany in the war efforts, as long as they could. They also made programs of ethnic cleansing, mass incarceration and mass murder parallel to the Nazi ones. (They themselves admitted they were basically the same thing, claiming for years that the Katyn massacre was done by the Germans and not the Soviets). The power in the Soviet Union was concentrated in the hands of a very few people at the highest ranks of the Communist Party. Any independent self-organization, including independent workers’ unions, was forbidden. Explain to me: What was so wonderful in all of that?

Okay. Even if this is correct, then we have: If the UK and the US had not stood up to Hitler, we would have a Stalinist regime spreading across all, not half of the continent. Nice.

Also, a reminder: The Soviets first collaborated with Hitler, attacking Poland together in 1939. They intensified rather than stopped the colonial practices of the Russian Empire.