Wikipedia is overwhelmingly western, and predominantly liberal in world outlook. It's handy for referencing basics, but it very clearly is limited by the dominant world outlook in the west. What I mean to say is that communist perspectives and non-western perspectives are unlikely to be presented on Wikipedia. It's far better to dig into scholarly research on the subjects, such as Professor Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance.

Socialists today defend the USSR because, despite the real flaws it had, it also had real, proven successes. Life expectancy doubled within a few short decades. Housing went from largely wooden shacks in rural areas to furnished homes and apartments. Education and healthcare was made free and high quality for all, and rates of murder, assault, prostitution, and more fell dramatically. Justice was approached not from the perspective of punishing people, but restoring them to functional members of society, even paying prisoners the same wages as any other worker, and allowing them up to 2 weeks vacation from prison!

Communism has a wonderful track record for the poor, for the working class, for the downtrodden. The biggest losers in socialism have been the ones with the most to lose, the former aristocrats and capitalists. Simply relying on what the most accessible literature in a capitalist-dominated internet landscape has to say about the world's first socialist state is a bit naive, of course it's going to have a negative outlook. But if you do your due diligence, as any socialist would have to when confronting the ghosts of the past haunting us today, you'll find that perspectives on the USSR are much more positive outside of western liberal media.

The majority of those who lived in the USSR regret its fall. This is consistent and well documented, because millions died when their social safety nets were privatized and taken from them, when their jobs were no longer assured. Prostitution resurged as a means of survival for many, and homelessness rose rapidly. Socialism works.