Well, in our case it's a bit more complicated, because here, the USSR was actually helping the common man. We were living in a right-wing dictatorship ourselves and the communist party, which was one of the most important groups fighting against it (and whose members were tortured and sent to concentration camps in Africa), got a lot of help from the USSR.
I was born after the transition, so it's easy for me to separate the issues (and to understand that good deeds are not always done for good reasons), but to the people who lived it, there is a real dissonance that is hard to deal with.
