This was in the 1930s under Stalin. USSR has more history than that; when I lived there, no one I knew was shot, no one was exiled; nor was anyone afraid of being shot or exiled (I can tell you what they were afraid of, though). My great grandmother's generation certainly remembered those times though.
Your statement plays on the perception that I have seen in the US that the USSR was this terrible place and all of its citizens hated it. I don't know if you are from the US, so, I will not make any assumptions. I can tell you that the propaganda machine here in the US is at least as good as it was in the USSR.
For the purpose of the article (and my comment) it really doesn't matter how the populace felt. My second comment had some snark due to your "idiotic statements" comment. But, there is a lot of reported history of purges, removal from film (had an article right here on HN about that), and exile of people whose opinions didn't jive with the current regime.
In USSR, I recall propaganda that said that everyone in the US was racist and that blacks were uniformly mistreated. Of course, the reality is that there was slavery, there was the civil rights movement and that now things are different. Broad statements like that smack of propaganda.
