I mean, Putin and other Russian imperialists see the collapse of the Soviet Union as a national embarrassment and the biggest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century. For many in Russia during the Soviet era, any communist ideology was secondary to being able to dominate their neighbors. To the current Russian state, the war in Ukraine is an attempt to rebuild the USSR under the banner of nationalism rather than socialism.

The sad fact is that Marxist-Leninism allows a buildup of nationalist and ethnonationalist sentiment within their states, even though the goal should be to unite the workers from all socialist states against the owning class. The biggest threat to socialism beyond capitalism is national and ethnic identity influencing the leadership of the movement. They favor their own in group, which breeds discontent in the out group, which can’t be addressed in the system due to the centralization of power under democratic centralism, which leads to more nationalism from people who’s self interest is not being addressed.

This is why Americans during the Cold War would refer to Soviets as Russians. They might not have been able to articulate a single thing wrong with communism, but they could still recognize that the Soviet Union seemed to represent the self interest of Russians more than any of the other states.