Perhaps you are making the fallacy of comparing early 20th century communist regimes with today's capitalist society. If you compared them with early 20th century capitalism or colonialism they start to look much more benign.
(There's this myth that's popular with some lefties that Soviets weren't really that oppressive until Stalin. It's not true - mass executions were already in full swing in 1918.)
Mass executions of (certain subsets of) the middle and upper classes, alongside electrification and land reform for the rural poor and trade unions and healthcare for the urban poor, meant an extremely significant improvement in the average quality of life for the Russian population.
If you look at early Soviet history, it's littered with peasant uprisings for this exact reason. In my hometown in Russia, such an uprising was big enough that Soviets decided to use chemical weapons against the rebels; ironically, I used to live on a street that was named after the guy who signed that order.