One of the most puzzling aspects to me of the rhetoric of the pro-Soviet Left in the mid-Twentieth Century was its insistence that Stalin's Russia was the most democratic nation in the world. Clearly the defenders of Stalin could not mean democracy in its usual sense; even Stalin's ardent defenders admitted that Soviet Russia was a dictatorship. An article from the Atlantic magazine archives on Henry Wallace and his run as the "Progressive" candidate for president shines a light on what they meant and also is a good example of why the Communists and fellow travelers put Wallace on a pedestal.
The article, which ran in August 1948, dissected Wallace's ever-changing political stands. It noted a speech he gave in 1942, when he was still Vice President of the United States, before a gathering of the Congress of American Soviet Friendship at Madison Square Garden in which he differentiated between "political or bill of rights democracy," exemplified by the US system, and "economic democracy" as supposedly practiced in the USSR. Ah hah. So that's it. Stalin's Russia was presumed to be an "economic democracy" in the sense that it maintained relative economic equality (not counting the perks enjoyed by top bureaucrats). In his speech Wallace said that he felt an over-emphasis on political democracy led to "rugged individualism, exploitation, impractical emphasis on states' rights and even to anarchy," but he also warned that taking economic democracy to the extreme "demands that all power be centered in one man and his bureaucratic helpers." He claimed to seek a balance between the two, saying that he had lost faith in "political democracy." He would later backtrack and attempt to explain away his remarks but rhetoric like this was a major reason why he was bounced from the ticket in 1944 despite FDR's support..
The article also cited a speech he made in April 1948 during his then current presidential campaign in which he stated that there was a fundamental difference between a Communist and a Fascist dictatorship despite certain superficial similarities. He said he deplored dictatorship of any kind, but believed that a Fascist dictatorship was far worse because it sought power for the sake of exploitation while the Communist dictatorship only sought a good life for its people and, eventually, a dissolution of dictatorship. Yeah, that's it. Stalin didn't care about personal power. He was only being ruthless to help the "People." Incredibly, only a month after the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, in the same speech Wallace reiterated the Party line that "the Russians have no necessity to expand their borders, nor will they for many decades to come, except as external threats and pressures compel them to seek military security."
To the incredible mindset of the Stalinists and fellow travelers, the absence of civil liberties in the Soviet Union was permissible, even necessary, to silence those who stood in the way of "economic democracy' but to impinge on the civil rights of the Communists was unacceptable in the US because it served the purpose of the fascists, a category that essentially included anyone who did not accept Stalinism.