Well there is a lot to unpack there but let's start with that last sentence the path forward for any country should be its own to choose and overwhelmingly all countries that had communism and then left it behind haven't wanted to get anywhere near that type of governance again, and many of them are far better off today than they were under Soviet oppression as the Soviet union was an extractive empire where their satellite countries in the eastern block had a larger population density and were by and large more educated than the average Russian, and this stayed true through the entire existence of the Soviet Union. The fact that the wealth gap on paper between the richest and poorest being as close is kind of the point as to have wealth and influence in any communist regime would not be personal wealth but the individual 's status within the regime and the perks of the job, kind of like how the President and all governors of the US, the french president, the prime minister of the UK, and most other governments give their executive leader free housing in their respective Capitals, but for communists like let's say Ceausescu had lavish mansions built for them while their countrymen starved. For education you can see in China today or north Korea, or any other Soviet country or non democratic country without a vast amount of easily accessible mineral wealth they will educate their country and publicize it for propaganda reasons on the one hand but on the other they limit the sorts of education the average civilian has access to, in china they have a vast number of engineers and use that to great effect for their manufacturing base, while also polluting their country in a way no democratized country would permit on their soil, but china doesn't have a lot of political science majors or those who don't follow their groupthink, in short their people can read and have marketable skills that don't endanger the power of the CCP, the same could be said about the Soviet union, and even there you had problems such as the belief that all life was equal and so despite oranges peing unable to grow in the Soviet union outside or climate controlled greenhouses they tried to force genetic communism to have oranges grow there and politics encroached on science leading to not much happening and a great loss of productivity. Central planning is not the best form of planning and is only good if you want to economically depress those under central planning control at best, see the current slate of dictates from the Trump whitehouse that have devastated the US economy outside of tech these last 2 years, it was a central planning style dictate without accounting for a myriad of factors or building up american production to pick up the slack instead the tariffs forced the poor to pay more while having fewer benefits and getting squeezed more and more, there are dozens of these decisions that led to major issues within the Soviet union and when it collapsed the countries under the yoke of the supreme soviet were able to better decide what they wanted their government to do, it was unstable for a bit but places like Poland and Estonia are thriving members of the EU who have no wish to follow your purity test and will continue doing their own thing so long as they are able to.

Kibbutzs existed before Israel for one but if you can say it is an element of settler colonialism on one hand and say that the USSR and Warsaw pact countries weren't russified on the other with a straight face while knowing about Russian backed separatist movements in Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova at a minimum, not to mention the large Russian population in Baltic nations, what happened to Crimea during the Soviet Union, and why Kazakhstan has a large Russian speaking population you have a very weird set of double standards. As for the Soviets wanting National Liberation within the Warsaw pact you might want to look at the history of what happened in Hungary in the 1950's, in Ukraine and Poland before world war 2 and during where they were forced to join the USSR by military occupation, what almost happened to Finland, why Romania and Yugoslavia set up defenses against land invasions from the Soviets and the list goes on, not to mention the border disputes with China, or what are called the color revolutions during the last years of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a colonial empire but not like that of the US or the UK but more like that of the mongols, Romans, or Chinese, cultures who expanded their borders not just for resources, but to implement their culture and defensive borders. Yes the US has a somewhat homogenous culture, but much of that can be attributed to Hollywood and mass distribution of media (and the genocide of indigenous peoples in the 1800's), Communists had those too but also controlled all media, enforcing propaganda and language norms, such as forcing the Magyar and ukranian languages into lower positions within their own countries in comparison to Russia for everything from education to government processes, similar to what france did in the last 300+ years with its internal languages and cultures, and China has been enforcing the dominance of the Han culture for close to 2000 years and has been getting rid of local languages for decades now to promote Mandarin.

Did communists kill or depose Stalin?