But Putin saying Soviet Union had no 'friends' is very silly.

I mean, silly on its face. What did he think the "Union" part of the USSR meant? It wasn't just Russians For Russia. You had the entire Warsaw Pact working towards a common goal.

I can see arguments that the Hungarian Revolution was the first in a long line of phony propaganda-inspired color revolutions. I can also see it as a real weakness in the early Soviet social model. The act of sending in tanks to suppress the revolt was a consequence of that failure, not the cause of it. One could say the same of Tienanmen. By the time the tanks arrived, the state had already failed.