In fairness, there's a bit of daylight between the proposition that district soviets should be erected in a wave of partisan fury against the kulaks, and the notion that there should be a social mechanism that ensures that people who object to prevalent corruption aren't perpetually barred from employment and left on the street to die. Sort of, you know, a middle way.
The fact that the society seems prosperous and the people visible within it seem content only establishes that things are well for those people in particular. It seems intuitive that industrial prosperity and hidden (or vanished) populations, large or small, have a causal relationship. As I once asked myself as I walked around an idyllic upstate vacation house for a society of priests, "who am I not seeing, and what is their relationship to this, and to me?"