First, I think you are right about the LARPing, people should stop it, as there is nothing worth repeating when it comes to the Soviet Union. It was a genocidal imperialist power. Not to mention the ushanka flag waving optics are horrible. But socialists need to be able to discuss the Soviet Union and why failed honestly, which is hard to do with a strict dichotomy.

The USSR was an imperialist and authoritarian country the exploited millions and committed a genocide. However, It also sent women into space at a time when NASA would still respond to little girls writing to them about their dreams of being an astronaut with:“stop dreaming”. The USSR also used its power on the security council to give civil rights advocates in the US a voice and pressured the US to end Jim Crow (many Cold War historians cite this pressure as one of the reasons the civil rights movements had some great successes). In some, some being the operative word, foreign policy the Soviet Bloc was a bulwark against western imperialism albeit for selfish reasons (the fate of the Congo after its decolonization along with apartheid, is a great example of the US and it’s allies being nearly as bad as the USSR rolling tanks into hungry).

This is not an attempt at apologia, the Soviet Union was bad. However I do think we should be open to analyzing the USSR as a failed experiment and figuring out what went wrong rather than pretending it never existed. Non-authoritarian socialists have to be better than tankies, who regard the world through a one dimensional uncritical lens. Remember, if the right socialists had won the Russian Revolution rather than the bolsheviks, we could be in a better world right now.