Not to mention the more general problems: You can get money/resources from the colonies, but you have absolutely zeroidea what they are producing. They could be making or consuming 1 ton of any given good, or 1 billion tons, running a trillion dollar annual deficit or $500B in the black, you have no way of knowing. You can still build facilities there, but you can't remove old ones. You can't control social spending or tax rates (even if it just mimicked your own settings for Russia...), and on and on.
You get nearly zero control over what is supposedly part of the same country. They were not autonomous regions with a loose alliance. IMO, it creates a gaggle of issues, to solve one (dissolution of the USSR should it occur).
Better control and more data need to be made available to the player at the least. Income, spending, resource production/consumption, manpower made available for military use, etc.