I think there are several reasons for it (of which yours is one). Two others are:
One. Very little was actually known in the West about that part of the world and the way the society that existed there functioned -- not to mention the attitudes of people who lived there, whom Westerners would almost never meet. They certainly would never spend time living in, say, Kharkov with ordinary Ukrainians. At the same time, the region had great ideological importance, with the result that you Had To Have An Opinion On It. This encouraged what could uncharitably be called "speculative extrapolation from sparse data" and uncharitably be called "making shit up." So you had the Monty Pythonesque spectacle of people debating about "state capitalism, or a deformed workers' state?" who didn't know a damn thing about the societies they thought they were discussing. I read one from the 80s a while ago trying to apply the example of Wales to the Baltic States. Whatever. Try applying the example of the Baltic States to the Baltic States. Whoops, you
don't know anything about the Baltic States. Fail.
Two. "Somewhere the struggle continues, even if it isn't over here!" In vague ways it parallels the excitement that the Soviet public felt over the Cubans and later the Nicaraguans: "Over here nothing much is going on and thing are kind of dull and bozhe Brezhnev's speeches are boring, but far over there Great Battles for Freedom are being waged! Hurrah!" Incidentally when Ortega got elected recently, "Sandinista Nostalgia" was the main theme in the Russian media coverage I saw: "Brezhnev time was boring, but in sun-drenched Latin America (so unlike Magnitogorsk) things were happening!"
--- On Wed, 6/17/09, SA <s11131978 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't think this is done so much out of a romantic desire
> to envision the opposition to Communism as idealistic and
> libertarian, but rather as a cognitive defense mechanism
> against having to think through the failure and rejection of
> a non-market economy. Critiques of planned economies coming
> from Western intellectuals can always be dismissed as
> bourgeois mystification. Widespread unhappiness and
> systematic rejection from the working class under socialism
> is a problem.
>
> SA
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