Under capitalism, a lot of the time, highly dangerous jobs are also highly paid. Kind of a balance that the individual decides to engage with. Same idea behind getting an advanced degree in STEM or law. I think of my job by example, I’m a power plant operator at a large combined cycle plant. No fucking shot I’d be doing this if the pay wasn’t good. I’m around explosive and deadly hot shit all day.
This is a caricature of how socialism has functioned. In socialist states, people were compensated for their labor, and necessities were heavily subsized or otherwise free.
To the contrary of your depiction, the USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.
When it comes to social progressivism, the soviet union was among the best out of their peers, so instead we must look at who was actually repressed outside of the norm. In the USSR, it was the capitalist class, the kulaks, the fascists who were repressed. This is out of necessity for any socialist state. When it comes to working class freedoms, however, the soviet union represented a dramatic expansion. Soviet progressivism was documented quite well in Albert Syzmanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union. This expansion in humanitarianism actually carried onto the judicial system, documented by Mary Stevenson Callcott in Russian Justice, written in 1935.
Reducing the tremendous gains made by socialist countries to the whims of Stalin or Mao is extremely reductive. It means every single victory gained by the working classes, such as free healthcare and education, massive literacy campaigns, huge increases in equality among the sexes, and more were in fact the exclusive whims of their leadership. It also reduces all of their problems, struggles, and flaws to personal failings of their leadership.
This kind of analysis is very flawed, and gets in the way of analyzing what went right and what went wrong in existing socialism. Simply painting a prettier picture of socialism in our heads and rejecting all existing socialist projects for not measuring up to that picture means we will be hopeless when we run into similar problems when we ourselves begin building socialism.