From
Freedom and Reason TL;DR: The Soviet Union was not a communist society. The deformities of the Soviet Union were for the most part the consequences of Western capitalist action against the Russian revolutionaries.
Communism as a social system has never existed in the modern period, communism as a social system cannot possibly be responsible for the death of a single person. One can never claim that communism doesn't work because (a) it worked for most of human history and (b) it has never been tested in the modern era.
Communism is the moral philosophy that holds that, since most production is inherently social, members of society should benefit, on the basis of need, from the fruits of social activity, and, furthermore, that all members should contribute to that activity on the basis of their abilities. Communism is the ethical value that every person should have a say so in the decisions that affect her life. It is unremarkable, albeit not popularly known, that this form of social existence is the original form of societal ordering. Most of human history has been spent in communities based on communism (there's a reason why the words are so similar). Economically-stratified societies are a historically recent occurrence and its advocates have tragically managed to obliterate almost everywhere the way human beings lived for most of history and prehistory.
socialism
