I’ve spent the last few years devouring Soviet history. Books, papers, blog posts, podcasts, all of it. I can’t get enough. Not to brag, but I do feel as though I’ve achieved a certain level of understanding about the USSR, its history, and eventual collapse. But I’ve also put the work in.
And yet, whenever I engage people I know IRL or online, I’m amazed by how doggedly people will defend what they just inherently “know”: that the Soviet Union was an evil totalitarian authority dictatorship that killed 100 million of its own people and eventually collapsed because communism never works. None of these people (at least the people I know IRL) have learned anything about Soviet history beyond maybe a couple days of lectures and a textbook chapter in high school history classes. Like, I get that this is the narrative that nearly every American holds in their heads. The fact that people believe this isn’t surprising. But what is a little surprising to me is that, when confronted with a challenge to that narrative from someone they know has always loved history and has bothered to learn more, they dig their heels in and insist they are right and I am wrong.
This isn’t about me, I’m just sharing my experience with this. I’m just amazed at how Americans will be completely ignorant about a topic (not just the USSR) but will be utterly convinced their views on that topic are correct, despite their own lack of investigation into that topic. This is the same country where tens of millions of people think dinosaurs and humans walked around together and will not listen to what any “scientist” has to say about it, after all.
it’s even worse with the descendants of euro-immigrants. I know a polish guy, gay, super liberal, who is absolutely convinced of the most bloodthirsty and reactionary narratives about the USSR because he’s from a polish family, and his polish grandma would never lie. If I’m talking about any kind of effort to improve society somewhat
he will go full 
and say “socialism is a good idea in theory, but never in practice, I should know, I’m polish, and both hitler and stalin genocided my people.” He’s generally a kind and friendly person who has been helpful on numerous occasions in the decade I’ve known him, but the second we start talking politics the gloves come off. He has a STEM background and gets paid fairly good, so I especially don’t care for the way he talks about working class people like they’re all ignorant trumpers who just need to learn to code.
Shouldn’t a techbro know that personal anecdotes are not evidence?
We need to write a doctoral thesis and even then it’s not enough.
But when they’re talking about how USSR bad it’s all “my grandma told me her dentist told her his ex girlfriend told him her husband told her a cab driver told him another passenger told them that they once saw Stalin strangle a Polish child to death with his bare hands”