Memes

Communism (as imagined by Marx and Engles) is broad and theoretical, and written in the revolutionary glow of the 19th century. "Leftist" discourse is still broad and theoretical, even 130 years after the final volume of Kapital was published. The people insisting on a single "socialist" model are often the people attempting to reduce it to a single (admittedly quite fascinating) period of history. All the reasons that period between 1914 and 1991 capture our collective imagination so frequently are the same reasons why it would be quite naieve to attempt to attribute any one ideology to the failure and collapse of any of the political projects of the time (of which there were a number, including the Soviet Union). The collapse of the Soviet Union was drawn out and complicated by international politics and post-war reconstruction; attempting to define socialism through the lens of that failure can really only be done in bad faith, or else is done while being willfully blind to the actual qualities of socialism and the actual conditions of the soviet collapse.

It's not enough to say "I don't want the soviet union again" unless you have an understanding of what it is, exactly, you are opposing. Will you simply sit around until a Lennin comes back around? If the Soviet Union was ever being remade in 2023, it wouldn't look anything like it did when it was formed almost 100 years ago. If you're opposed to authoritarianism, then oppose authoritarianism. Stand for democracy. If you believe in the socialist ideals, then stand for them, too. You don't have to call yourself a socialist, but it sure as hell doesn't help you if you willfully misinterpret people with shared interests because you've naively accepted a definition of socialism that is conveniently constructed around the failure of a single political project of the 20th century and is otherwise blind to any of its details.

It honestly just sounds like you're confused, or otherwise quite determined to collapse a complicated and nuanced political and economic theory into a single failed entity (which you strongly oppose, I gather). I'm not really interested in playing this game of definitions or political compass navigation with you; if you're interested in where your political values might overlap with socialist theory then I recommend you read a fucking book (pardon my french).