It’s not about Communism, it’s about Russian power, be it Czars or Commissars or Putin.
For us in America it is very much about Communism. However, you are very correct, in my opinion, that the post-Suslov Soviet elite, those who rose through the ranks in the 70s and ended up on top in the 80s were not communist ideologues but rather nationalists and imperialists. Their main concern was preservation of the soviet spheres of power around the Kremlin. Putin, for example, considers the disintegration of the Soviet Union the greatest tragedy of the 20c, not unlike some Anglophile would consider the disintegration of the British empire a great tragedy. But Putin would readily acknowledge that the soviet economic system was unworkable. This is another argument against Golitsyn’s analysis.