You're conflating communism and authoritarianism. Nothing about Communism as a concept requires massacring people. It's just that in the 20th century those who were murderous autocrats used Communism to convince their (often poor) countrymen to give them power and they killed people in service of that power.
Communist and Socialist governments were a popular vehicle for getting poor people to join an uprising in the 20th century and despots took advantage of that.
Maybe that's a distinction without a difference given that we've never really seen a non-authoritarian communist government. But communism has only been around for a century, so it's not out of the realm of reason that there'll be a Communist government that isn't brutal at some point. We certainly have somewhat Socialist governments that treat their people well right now.
Communism isn't real Communism
The opposite reasoning also works. Why assume this is a private sector Russian with an interest in politics, when there is a more simple/straightforward answer in who would create something like this?
I do agree that Russians should have been interested in the election, as most of the world should for a country that has a large impact on the socioeconomic fabric, but any time you begin to input your own time/money into something, you immediately become obviously vested in the outcome of something you have no right in influencing.
>Secondly, how are these ads meant to benefit Russia specifically? What are these ads supposed to achieve? The evil plan being to "sow division in society"?
Come on, it should be very clear to you why these are beneficial to a supposed Russian effort to affect the election. Demonization is a classic, and effective strategy to influence opinion, and while I do agree that this meme is a very ineffective rhetorical strategy to you/me when we look at it in a more skeptical light than normal, just seeing this on your Facebook feed randomly could be very effective to many people.
>The whole Russia-American-election story continues to look to me like a huge set of suppositions and dubious mental leaps.
It's an investigation that hasn't been finished yet, so I do understand a skittishness in the veracity of some of the claims made so far in the dossier, but the idea that the entirety of the Russian collusion saga has just been trumped-up charges is a joke. Two men have been indicted, and another plead guilty to crimes that are at least casually related to a possible Russian collusion.
>It's all very clearly an attempt to get Trump impeached. Motivated reasoning is bound to follow.
Politically it's absolutely an attempt to impeach Trump, yet day after day more information is released/revealed/found that is more and more damning to the idea that something illegal didn't happen in the 2016 election.
Remember, the idea of Russian collusion isn't something that was just made up after Trump became President. There has been a natural build up of evidence/steam that has slowly shed more light on possible activities by those strongly linked with Trump, or by Trump himself.
>PS. I am not a Russian.
Neither am I. It doesn't matter.