The people that are creating the mainstream narratives about Russia and the USSR, they're not even Russian, they're Americans that grew up in in the United States and decided to - like you said - cherry-pick the perspectives of super anti-communist people, that came from the the USSR and eastern Europe. I think the the biggest example that we can use is Timothy Snyder who Grover Furr calls out [for what Snyder writes in] his book Bloodlands, because he makes all of these crazy assertions about the things in the USSR that most people in Russia and even in eastern Ukraine - which are relevant to his writings - would think are ridiculous. And the reason is because he only cites super ultra-nationalist sources, like sources from people who are like the descendants of nazi collaborators. These are the sources that are being used by mainstream academia to frame a narrative what the USSR was like.
