You seem to be mixing up several things here. Central planning, totalitarianism, and communism/socialism are not the same thing, and can't be used interchangea

You seem to be mixing up several things here. Central planning, totalitarianism, and communism/socialism are not the same thing, and can't be used interchangeably, just because the USSR happened to have all three going on. Each one of those can be a thing without some or all of others. You can have a democratically run, centrally planned economy. In fact, that's what many Western capitalist countries are in many ways. On the opposite spectrum, a truly democratic, anarchist-style "centrally" planned economy could also be possible, check out "The Dispossessed" by Ursula Le Guin for a fictional example. As someone who also lived in the USSR and also caught the tail end of the country's life, I know of older people who would prefer Soviet-style life to what they see now unfolding in capitalist societies. And that's taking into account all the worst problems and mistakes of the USSR and not even talking about what could have been done better, or fundamentally different, while still rejecting capitalism. USSR of the 80s was different from the USSR of the 70s, and that was different from the 60s, etc. And you'd probably get different reactions from ex-Soviets, if they only experienced the turmoil of the 80s vs the optimism of earlier decades. So again, I agree that non-democratic or totalitarian control of the economy is indeed bad, but that has nothing to do with central planning.