Interesting that you suggest they had "almost zero support" when
1. A referendum with the wording
"""
Do you consider it necessary to preserve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics, in which the rights and freedoms of a person of any nationality will be fully guaranteed?
"""
Got 77.85% of the vote, and the union only collapsed after internal political struggles led to the individual republics pulling out of their own accord.
2. Just five years later, the honest-to-god Communist Party candidate won %40.73 of the votes in an election against the incumbent Yeltsin -- despite such allegations of voter fraud that "At a meeting with opposition leaders in 2012, then-president Dmitry Medvedev was reported to have said, 'There is hardly any doubt who won [the 1996 election]. It was not Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin.'"
So clearly your statement
> And since it is impossible to have near-zero support without totalitarian oppression
can't be correct, unless you're alleging that Yeltsin was secretly using totalitarian measures to support his opposition in the 1996 election.
> the tops of the Communist Party (led by Yeltsin)
Yeltsin was an anti-Communist, he opposed the leadership of the Communist party. The actual "tops of the Communist Party" were divided between the Gorbachev-led liberalizing faction and the hardline faction, both of whom wanted to preserve the USSR -- but in the wake of the coup attempt by the latter faction, both were discredited and it was Yeltsin and the other regional leaders, not the heads of the central CPUSSR, who came out on top.
> It's just that before Gorbachev and Yeltsin all the statistics were fake, and people were repressed for contradicting it.
This is just conspiratorial thinking. Here, I found the most aggressively western-capitalist source I could think of: https://www.rand.org/pubs/conf_proceedings/CF124.chap4.html -- even Rand Corp. describes a drop of population growth rates from 6-7% to net negative over the course of the liberalization of prices.
1. A referendum with the wording
""" Do you consider it necessary to preserve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics, in which the rights and freedoms of a person of any nationality will be fully guaranteed? """
Got 77.85% of the vote, and the union only collapsed after internal political struggles led to the individual republics pulling out of their own accord.
2. Just five years later, the honest-to-god Communist Party candidate won %40.73 of the votes in an election against the incumbent Yeltsin -- despite such allegations of voter fraud that "At a meeting with opposition leaders in 2012, then-president Dmitry Medvedev was reported to have said, 'There is hardly any doubt who won [the 1996 election]. It was not Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin.'"
So clearly your statement
> And since it is impossible to have near-zero support without totalitarian oppression
can't be correct, unless you're alleging that Yeltsin was secretly using totalitarian measures to support his opposition in the 1996 election.
> the tops of the Communist Party (led by Yeltsin)
Yeltsin was an anti-Communist, he opposed the leadership of the Communist party. The actual "tops of the Communist Party" were divided between the Gorbachev-led liberalizing faction and the hardline faction, both of whom wanted to preserve the USSR -- but in the wake of the coup attempt by the latter faction, both were discredited and it was Yeltsin and the other regional leaders, not the heads of the central CPUSSR, who came out on top.
> It's just that before Gorbachev and Yeltsin all the statistics were fake, and people were repressed for contradicting it.
This is just conspiratorial thinking. Here, I found the most aggressively western-capitalist source I could think of: https://www.rand.org/pubs/conf_proceedings/CF124.chap4.html -- even Rand Corp. describes a drop of population growth rates from 6-7% to net negative over the course of the liberalization of prices.