From the "I remember" I assume you lived through it. Were you per chance from "proper" soviet union, aka Moscow / Petrograd area? Because allegiance to the state and nothing else was the ideal in the "less correct" regions such as Baltics. It "got better" as time wore on, but especially after the occupation, every attempt was made to erode anything and everything else people might gather around. Forced ethnic mixing with deportations to faraway regions to dillute national identity. Pioneer movement and schoolwork that taught you to think of the union first, family second. Heck, even open encouragement to rat out your parents for "un-soviet" behavior.
It might be sovietophobic in the sense we would rather not have it repeat, to put mildly. But for the occupied regions, it was far from fiction.
This is what gets peddled across the world, but for the most part, Soviet Union eas busy creating those national identities. Sometimes it took a break when it became too inconvenient, only to resume it later. Soviet Union is who created these national states in the first place. There were no Georgia and no Uzbekistan before the USSR. In both cases there were a bunch of unaligned tribes or much smaller principalities with no real national identity.
You are right about national policy of the early Soviet Union which was promoting national identities of people of former Russian Empire [0] but you are definitely wrong about Georgia [1].
Unaligned tribes? That's... quite a thing to claim, especially about Georgia which had unified national monarchy and long dynasties since Middle Ages, only falling to endless external conquests due to being located between several large parts of the world.
I don't really understand what you claim to be the Soviet propaganda. 400 years of the unified Kingdom of Georgia founded in 11th century?.. Mingrelia was one of the pieces of a single country torn apart by Arab, Persian, Turkic, and Mongolian conquests.
A lot of ethnicities are torn apart and stay that way. Ask Kurds. Or XXI century Russians for that matter.
I am just pointing out that Soviet Union has encouraged large ethnicities to coalesce, collect their shared history and culture (often inventing large portions in process) and build a nation state on top of that. This is not something you should take for granted, but that's what you've got under Soviet rule.
Not everybody got that privilege, of course. Ethnic Russians, but also Jews and Germans, did not get to have their own nation state in USSR. Technically, Jews had one but it was a joke[1]; Germans briefly had one[2]; Russians hoped to have one after WW2, with capital in Leningrad, but were derailed (Leningrad affair[3]). RSFSR was like a one huge Washington DC in that regard, with glistering Moscow and Leningrad but it was more like Puerto Rico as you descended into Nechernozem'ye[4]. No statehood.
It might be sovietophobic in the sense we would rather not have it repeat, to put mildly. But for the occupied regions, it was far from fiction.