There has never been a communist country; only countries run by communist parties.

They were “communist” just as much as North Korea is “democratic”.

Just because a word exists in a name, doesn’t mean that the word actually applies in any fashion whatsoever. The political parties of both the USSR and China were as communist as fish are birds. Which is to say, absolutely not. They wore “communism” as a thin veneer of legitimacy over a bulwark of feudalistic authoritarianism.

And the real clue is in the name: Communism. Communal. No real leaders aside from administrative functionaries. Classless and cooperative. Everything that the USSR and China never was.

Edit: Russia became communist in 1917. By every metric with which you could possibly measure communism, it was dead by 1918.

You're splitting hairs, no state can be communes by definition so it's a moot point. The term "communist country" is a colloquialism refers to centrally planned socialist states that have or had a stated goal to one day achieve communism. There's no point in getting riled up about it.

I honestly think that if every self-identified leftist decided to spend 365 contiguous days without voicing even one opinion that involves semantics, we would end up with a net benefit to the cause because it wouldn't be actively damaged for a change.