Lenin himself called the system he instituted state capitalism, it was supposed to be a transitory state as Marx said (and the Bolsheviks were very big on historical materialism) that first you have capitalism, develop productivity, then communism would follow naturally as a consequence of resolving capitalism’s inherent contradictions.
The gaslighting started with Stalin, who invented the term “really existing socialism” to make it doubly clear that it was neither real, existed, or was socialism.
The closest any society ever got to communism isn’t via the Bolshevik “dictatorship of the proletariat” (aka dictatorship of the state bureaucracy), but via Anarchism. Horizontal organisation, abolish hierarchies. Very early revolutionary Russia qualifies until the Bolsheviks abolished councils in practice, Rojava qualifies, Chiapas qualifies, revolutionary Spain (until Bolsheviks teamed up with fascists to kill it off), revolutionary Ukraine (until the Bolsheviks – I think you see the pattern).