I'd wager that much of that is because people are susceptible to be lured by the idea of strength. If you identify severe problems with how the world is, even a

I'd wager that much of that is because people are susceptible to be lured by the idea of strength. If you identify severe problems with how the world is, even an oppressive government like what the bolsheviks created that claims to solve them might seem like a ray of hope, and you might be willing to look past a lot of horrid things / convince yourself that they're not real so long as you believe those fundamental problems with the organisation of labour and wealth are being solved. It is worth noting that this infatuation was by no means universal - Camus and Sartre famously had a split over Soviet gulags, and Orwell consistently criticised the Soviet Union's authoritarianism despite both being socialists. The fact that only centralised, authoritarian socialist governments managed to take power in the first half of the 20th century has probably done irreparable damage to the idea of communism. If more moderate, decentralised, or liberal (as opposed to authoritarian) governments had managed to take power (such as in Spain) people might not be as quick to dismiss the (in my opinion, very real) structural issues in capitalist systems, and we might live in a better world today because of it - or perhaps that is just my infatuation with the counterfactual!