Current events are, arguably, a refutation of soviet ideals (for all that they were often broken) and even practice - Putin explicitly talks in points related t

Current events are, arguably, a refutation of soviet ideals (for all that they were often broken) and even practice - Putin explicitly talks in points related to Tsarist Imperial Russia, and a core argument of his invasion is that Ukrainians aren't a separate nation with separate language, and Ukraine "isn't a real country". Things that, for all the oppression, were accepted and obvious part of USSR - there was Ukrainian SSR, not Ukraine as region of Greater Russia. Even with effective forcing of Russian language for all technical uses, even Stalin at his worst dealt with USSR as union of many nations, even if some artificially created from displaced people (in order to create single-nation autonomous regions).