Yeah - that's fair, and a mistake on my part - they were socialist, but not communist (lack of worker enfranchisement among other gaps).

I think the main issue with the USSR (and probably the majority of "communist" countries) was the failure to put in the pre-work. Without levelling the economic imbalances and setting up a strong welfare state ahead of time, they created imbalanced economic conditions, which were functionally imbalances in political power that led to a collapse into an authoritarian oligarchy - exacerbated by the challenge of trying to retool the economy overnight to keep people fed.

Plenty to learn from, not much to emulate.