Research done by people whose purpose wasn't to produce red-scare propaganda (I don't know how I could have worded that better, I'm not a native speaker)
Basically, I live in a country where the communist party used to be very powerful. Red scare has been a thing here, but leftism was strong in the country, and lots of historians here have published good quality researches about the USSR
Fun fact though: our """communist""" party is now between centrism and neoliberalism. Their alliance with the socialist party destroyed anything it had to do with communism
Patriotism is just a nice word people invented to be proud of their genocidal and colonialist country without feeling too bad about it.