One of the most interesting little nuggets on this is Reagans notes on Able Archer 83, where he for the first time seems to have realised that the Soviet leaders weren't cartoon villains, but actually were just as scared of the US as the US was of them.

That doesn't make the authoritarian nature of the regime any better, nor does it excuse any of the brutality, but it demonstrated how reductive it had been to try to interpret how they were thinking based on an outsider view that generalised all of them into some archetype without understanding individual motivations.

The irony is that so much of Western thinking of this assumes a ridiculous level of collectivism that never existed because it's fundamentally at odds with human nature.

If anything a lot of people have adopted what they deem a "communist mind" in their own analysis of these regimes - and ideologies - and treat large groups of people as if they are carbon copies.