From having talked to around a hundred such people, humans' experiences under the old Soviet Union were a wide gamut from horror to tedium to brilliance, with a serious dose of deprivation for almost everyone at some point or another. (My father, who was an expert in Slavic languages, talked to a man who was one of two people who survived when the Nazis machine-gunned his village, when his grandmother's body knocked him down out of the line of fire and he played dead until nightfall.)

To call the old Soviet Union a "cult-like" society is just ridiculous, though. By the 60s and 70s, no one believed the shit they were being fed from the top - and yes, I did get to talk to some of these people at the time. But no one wanted to stand up and get squashed, so the results were cynicism, nihilism, and really broad sarcasm.

I was shocked when I visited Eastern Europe a few times in the 2010s as to how many rational, thoughtful people were sentimental for the USSR.

No one thought it could have survived, or that it was being run by benevolent people, and there were constant shortages and difficulties, but life was overall easier and less uncertain.

The Russian revolution took a country that was literally in the eighteenth century, and in just one generation industrialized it into the twentieth. No wonder names like Traktor and Elektrifikatsiya were so popular in the SSRs after the war. This was a great accomplishment - of course, now we know that industrialization inevitably leads to the destruction of the biosphere, but that was a long time ago.

So I don't see the USSR as "culti-like" but simply an oppressive authoritarian dictatorship.

As a contrast, it seems that most North Koreans actually believe in the divinity of their ruling family.

I have never met even one person from NK, but a friend of mine was working in an international organization with representatives from many nations. When the previous Kim died, the NK member didn't show up for a couple of days, and when he did, his eyes were so puffy from continuous crying that he was almost unrecognizable, and he would keep bursting into tears for the next few weeks. There was no other Korean there for him to be showing off for - he was completely devastated. Other anecdotes seem to reinforce this impression.

I believe Juche a cultural PTSD from having 85% of their buildings destroyed and one person in six killed in a few weeks during the Korean War.