Technology for advancing the “state of the art is fine”…it’s simply hypocritical to disguise it as a commercial venture.
Besides, I doubt if the TU-144 did anything more tio advance Soviet aerospace than their many military probrams…and there seemed to be plenty of R&D funds for those, so was it really needed as a benefit for the industrial base?

As you can perhaps imagine, such projects as Tu 144 have military value and potential for usage as well. There were a number of serious studies by Tupolev for military use of Tu 144, and even some flight testing from one of the northern bases of Soviet Navy, I suppose to test the feasibility of use as an ELINT aircraft. But Tupolev instead decided to concentrate on Tu 22M and Tu 160, with a lot of engine and aerodynamics knowledge taken from Tu 144 program.
Pretty much in the same way as Boeing has military versions of B707, B747, B767 etc. So you really cant draw a border there, what is military and what is civilian.

At least the Concorde had a chance at commercial success (before the oil rice hike) because it gave them a product that America was not going to offer (the US program fell victim to the “green” lobby in congress, one of the first major successes of the environmental movement).

It depends on how you calculate commercial success. Its worth saying that Concorde was a state run project much like Tupolev, and British Airways also was 100% government owned when they began operating the type. Also R&D costs were written down by government to nil, so the “success” was pretty much the product of creative accounting.

The concept of a first class luxury airliner in a communist state shows how stupid and corrupt the USSR had become.

Well, the USSR was in certain way stupid and corrupt, but that has nothing to do with designing such magnificent and technically complicated aircraft. Otherwise it would be fair to say that USA were stupid and corrupt because Henry Ford built Edsel (studied since then as an example how the cars should not be built) or because North American built XB-70, which didn’t have even slim chance to do the job it was intended for.