Way too much Hollywood stereotype there, fren.. You have been raised in a system constantly reminding you of how the Soviets were chopping heads, torturing their own neighbors and eating their children.. Nothing can be further from the truth..

Of course, it is not to say that there was no suffering or incarceration throughout the Soviet times (your own prisons surely were empty at that time, right?).. KGB might be an epitome of state brutality in your books, but in reality, 90% of KGB officers were occupied with what all intel services do: information analytics.. that means, reading local newspapers, talking to local people, gathering intel and then writing a summary incl. a prediction report for the boss.. or, once they were "lucky" to get deployed in the west, they were usually trying to find a supplier on some technology which was officially embargoed, say programmable precision machinery, CPUs or composites.. the idea that KGB automatically equals to cutting someone's fingers or running around with a silenced 22LR in the pocket and killing people is just plain wrong..

Just for clarification, I was raised in Czechoslovakia, a then commie land.. I know my stuff, you know yours.. Not trying to argue or persuade anyone here, take it for what it's worth.. now, after having been able to directly compare the two systems I can say that people are quite the same and that many things which we found wrong with commies are now being exercised in the US, just under a new name..