I think that’s basically right. They applied the logic of opposing Czarist oppression to opposing capitalist oppression, even as they (we) were succeeding at that capitalist game in a country that was so fundamentally different from the places they had left behind in terms of opportunity and social mobility.
I am reminded of the “journalist” who was recently interviewing a black Hollywood star. Both are extremist racists. Both are liberal. But I repeat myself.
The black accused challenged the journalist at one point about “being white” ...
The “journalist” - very clearly shocked at being accused that way, immediately replied, “but I am NOT white. I’m Jewish.”
We tend in the US to forget that throughout most of the Euro-Russian world for the first half of the 20th century, the choice wasn’t between a (pardon the expression :> ) free republic and central control, but between Marxism and Fascism: you were either a Communist/Socialist or a Fascist/Nazi. If Hitler hadn’t become the Fuhrer, Thalmann would have brought Germany into the Stalinist camp. By the same token, Quisling became a pseudo-Nazi because he had learned to hate the effect of the Russian Revolution, but it didn’t seem to occur to him or anyone else—except Churchill, and maybe DeGaulle—that there was the American option, the option of Aristotle and Locke and Jefferson.