The issue is, you're just someone on the internet. The real people I know disagree with you, and so do statistics, so while I completely empathize with you, I can't agree.
Use your logic then. Ask yourself who was defecting where. Ask yourself who had a the better level of life and who had the gulags. Ask yourself why so many countries and their hundred of millions of inhabitants violently overthrew the communist regime at the end of the '80s.
Better yet, go ahead and pay a visit to the communist success stories of N Korea, Cuba or Venezuela. They are still around. Maybe they will convince you.
Then finally look around at the very tools you are using. The car you are driving, the furnace heating your house, the computer you write on. They are all success stories of capitalism. Ask yourself where are the success stories of communism. What things it built, what hard, concrete, useful stuff it created. Believe the proof presented to you by the real world - and reject the propaganda.
The majority of the citizens of the USSR were against its dissolution - but that didn't matter, it was mostly an elite affair.
I look at statistics and what people that I know and lived there told me. Most people who were adults at the time seem to regret the fall of the Soviet Union, and most people from post-Soviet states had to leave when they couldn't make a living anymore as the economy collapsed - despite post Soviet states being squarely in the middle of what you can expect from life on earth and above the median in all relevant metrics.
So certainly, it wasn't perfect, but it was very far from hell on earth, and squarely above the middle.
Your stories are also quite telling - the computer I'm using was only possible under capitalism because the government gave itself the power to control ideas, as capitalism is otherwise incompatible with large-scale intellectual innovation. I drive no car, as it is far inferior to good quality public transportation plus walkable neighborhood, and my house is electrically heated by 100% renewable energy because we had the good sense of nationalizing the power grid and making massive investments in renewable energy (which we now produce at costs lower than any free market of energy, renewable or not).
The actual evidence when I try to look it at critically, shielding myself from all forms of propaganda (in the classical sense of the word), makes it clear that reality is far more nuanced than is common wisdom in these circles, and one of those results after careful study of history and data is that the USSR did not, in fact, have much of an issue retaining engineers and scientists, and relative to its size and prosperity did an okay job at innovating and keeping its population happy. Far from the best, but much better than most.
Better yet, go ahead and pay a visit to the communist success stories of N Korea, Cuba or Venezuela. They are still around. Maybe they will convince you.
Then finally look around at the very tools you are using. The car you are driving, the furnace heating your house, the computer you write on. They are all success stories of capitalism. Ask yourself where are the success stories of communism. What things it built, what hard, concrete, useful stuff it created. Believe the proof presented to you by the real world - and reject the propaganda.