It's all beautifully and scientifically written, but one phrase turns it all into dust and points to the Western mainstream.
I am a Soviet Russian, I was 23 when the Soviet Union collapsed, I had already served in the Soviet Army and such definitions cut my ears. What kind of tyranny are you talking about if we, ordinary residents of Russia, in your interpretation the main tyrants of eastern Europe, envied ordinary residents of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, GDR, Yugoslavia, a little less Bulgaria and Romania, because in the ordinary everyday sense they all lived better than us? And even then it was clear that this is not because they are all smarter or better at work, but because all this is paid for by our resources. I fully agree that people in the West lived even better and these, in your interpretation of the tyrannized, did not have the opportunity to live the same way, i.e. there was some control. Yes, there was a leaky control, because if it were at least something worthwhile tyranny, then the events of 1956 and 1968 in Budapest and Prague simply could not have happened. Why did this control arise and was exist, or, in other words, how could it not arise, if we recall that all the countries of Eastern Europe, except Poland and Czechoslovakia occupied by the Germans, were allies of Nazi Germany during its attack on the USSR and participated in this attack.
I don't want to portray the USSR as the best human formation that existed, probably not, but seeing what was happening on the "other side", I can't put it next to it. If you like to call the influence of the Soviet Union tyranny, your will, but then what do you call what nazi Germany did on the territory of Belarus you mentioned, and can these things be equated at least approximately?