One of the lessons of the USSR, your leader saying something is so and shooting / exiling everyone who says different does not make for a prosperous, sustainable government.
While China today isn't nearly as bad as the USSR was, their authoritarian government that still jails and executes political opponents hasn't stopped their political stability and economic success.
Who you jail and the effect that said jailing has on other people also matters.
But, now that you've brought it up, do you think that they're equally bad? (Note - "both bad" doesn't imply "equal".)
This was in the 1930s under Stalin. USSR has more history than that; when I lived there, no one I knew was shot, no one was exiled; nor was anyone afraid of being shot or exiled (I can tell you what they were afraid of, though). My great grandmother's generation certainly remembered those times though.
Your statement plays on the perception that I have seen in the US that the USSR was this terrible place and all of its citizens hated it. I don't know if you are from the US, so, I will not make any assumptions. I can tell you that the propaganda machine here in the US is at least as good as it was in the USSR.
For the purpose of the article (and my comment) it really doesn't matter how the populace felt. My second comment had some snark due to your "idiotic statements" comment. But, there is a lot of reported history of purges, removal from film (had an article right here on HN about that), and exile of people whose opinions didn't jive with the current regime.
In USSR, I recall propaganda that said that everyone in the US was racist and that blacks were uniformly mistreated. Of course, the reality is that there was slavery, there was the civil rights movement and that now things are different. Broad statements like that smack of propaganda.
I am pretty sure the statement applied to the whole run of the USSR. Maybe more in parts and less in others, but they ignored the reality of their situation.
You seem to be trying to add things to what I said that have nothing to do with the statement and truly I am never happy with the "well your just as bad/worse" argument. It really doesn't have anything to do with what I said or prove me wrong. For example, the whole second paragraph of the above post has nothing to do with what I said.