“Besides that it was a classic example of the really hideously ugly monuments the Soviets erected in the final generation of its existence that were both massive and tacky looking at the same time.”
Communist “art” is built to standards arrived at by a committee. Anything done by a committee lacks any artistic merit because everyone has an input instead of just one person’s idea of what art is. Each person takes the other person’s ideas and changes them not for merit but because they can, and they want to contribute something to justify their existence. Each contributes something they “think” the others will like and everything normalizes to the same palette of gray and heroic.
They also actively wanted to turn away from established/popular aesthetic standards, because those were associated with the pre-revolution era. Hence their embrace of styles such as Brutalism and designers such as Le Corbusier.