Not having lived in Soviet Union, but having lived in a communist system, and am old enough to very much remember it, I think you have a very mistaken idea of r

Not having lived in Soviet Union, but having lived in a communist system, and am old enough to very much remember it, I think you have a very mistaken idea of repression of free speech in those systems post-Stalin. So how did it work? It worked by intense social and governmental pressure, whereby expressing a thought that was "forbidden" led to incredibly overexaggerated offense and incredulity that someone could think WRONGLY like this (pro capitalist, anti worker, bourgeois, etc). In fact, I have to say that over time, living here in Canada, I feel increasingly like that sort of totalitarianism lite is increasingly becoming familiar, where any even very minor dissent in thought is quickly shouted down as racist / transphobic / insert-X-phobic / anti immigrant, anti-whatever, even if said thought may bear no reasonable resemblance to supposed offence.