Not in quite the same way with people's imaginations running away from them. Perhaps important to remember how opaque the USSR was at the time -- e.g. when Che

Not in quite the same way with people's imaginations running away from them. Perhaps important to remember how opaque the USSR was at the time -- e.g. when Chernobyl blew up, no one outside the USSR knew until radiation drifted over the border, and large riots were often received as only vague word of mouth rumour in the West. In such an information void, your imagination fills in the details. Especially if you worry about their industrial capacity, and maybe even secretly wonder if they do have a better way of organizing society like they claim, in terms of pure brutal results. A closer analogy today would be with China, and how paranoid some people were with the offensive potential of a balloon.