"Sure, the USSR became more benign over time..."
I think this needs substantial qualification. The regime liberalised after Stalin because the old methods were becoming inefficient.
When Kruschev raised the minimum wage, pensions & disability allowance, and reduced Russia's reliance on forced labour (it was not abandoned altogether), it is more than probable that this was a way to raise the morale and the efficiency of the workers, to decrease the rate of theft and sabotage in the factories and to try and put a stop to the manipulation of Stakhanovite time-motion studies by workers hoping to decrease their workload and increase their income. Didn't exactly work, but there is no question that Kruschev was faced with a legacy that was not congruent with efficient production from that bureaucratic elite's point of view.
The relaxation of terror also had economic significance, in the sense that the pervasive menace of the secret police tended to create dissonance and disruption. It was no longer necessary to disturb vast quantities of people and enforce rigid discipline in order to industrialise - instead, what was needed was economic efficiency - and with that went inducements and so on. Productivity was generally lower in forced labour camps than in free labour shops.
Doug,
if you're arguing that there was popular support for the regime in Russia, I'm afraid I missed the evidence. I would argue that it would be impossible for us to guage exactly how much popular support existed for the regime, even if we had opinion polls available - because such evidence might not mean very much. "Consent" obviously means something different in a dictatorship than in a liberal democracy - so I reckon the first problem we'd have would be the definition of terms.
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