I'd say it also starts with the soviet union. Many people,me too, saw the soviet union as an ideological state, which is why leftists loved it. And many right wingers in the West saw it's collapse in 1990 as the people "coming to their senses". And with information on russian inner workings and daily lives being sparse people could project their wishes into Russia. Especially with the economic rise in the 2000's under Putin being a convenient talking point for how great authoritarianism is, which is moot because Russia actually was more of a petrol state at that point.
USSR was also masters of media control.
You could not freely travel inside the USSR or within a member state of the USSR. You had to have internal passports. You think the Chinese "Social Score" shit is bad you have no fucking idea, USSR pioneered it. Thus dissents could be shoved to remote corners of the empire to die or break, and you had "model towns" where the wealthy elite lived, so when the commie dick suckers went to visit, they only saw perfectly working communism and not the gulags and vodka-niggers making it work.
They also only saw Ethnic Russians, but were told that this Ethnic Russian was from Kazakhstan and see how well he's treated? Its no different from other Russians! Never look at this family tree or see that other than his parents and siblings his entire family lives outside of Moscow. Communism is the most equal system, Comrade!
Don't talk about the Holodomor, don't talk about the
Aral Sea, dont' talk about Chernobyl, any of their other Nuke Projects or testing areas, don't talk about the sable & fox farms, don't talk about the gulags or
Cannibal Island, the forced relocations of minority ethnicities to the worst most remote places and the mortality rates they experienced ... just ignore all that. And you can ignore all that if you just want to suck on anti-capitalist propagranda, because of the throttle-grip they have on people and the media.
One of the most striking places this "performative reality" was evident was in computing. They would bring in western computer science professors for "information sharing" and would show them the latest soviet computer machine - so much faster than the western ones! Never mind that the formula being plugged in had been meticulously groomed for the hardware, or that the machine had blown half of its shit-tier QC vaccum tubes in the demo and would be down for a week for reservicing.
The Soviet Professors would talk about how great the potential was, and that the government had put in the order for 5,000 to be built so every soviet university would have its own - order that were then scaled back to 3 machines which were never completed.
This lie was repeated until the 80s, when the Soviets were so far behind western computation - even with stolen designs and shell-company purchases licenses - that they couldn't even pretend to keep up the facade believably.
Another case was the Soviet's first "smart bomb". The bomb didn't lock on to the image of the target, so they pained the target orange. That didn't work so they painted a meter-wide, mile long stripe on the concrete and reprogramed the bomb to follow it. But the demonstration showed a bomb be released and hit kinda near its target. It didn't work, would never work, but the Soviets made sure that NATO knew they were ordering 1,000.
And it was effective. I remember my highschool teachers repeating things that I would learn, post college, was zombie Soviet Agiprop for useful idiots, and that when I had it repeated to me had been thoroughly disproven for years by access to Soviet records. Shit about how Russia during the cold war had these super advanced machines and projects that were stopped by EVIL CAPITALIST CORPORATIONS.
The USSR produced only two things in any real quantity: Ill-fitting shoes and dead commies.
