A Communist doesn’t criticize the secular Communist god Lenin - his methods, intentions or policies.
Putin admits that while he spent a good part of his life in the party, he never saw its ideals put into practice in the Soviet time.
And a Communist didn’t hang out with democratic reformers like Leningrad’s Anatoly Sobchak in early 1990s.
There is not much to said about the Soviet period because Communism was the god that failed.
No one in Russia mourns its demise.
Sure they do, disavow in all moral rules allows them to do pursue any strategy to victory that they please:
“Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin are widely known as the founders of Communism. However, not everyone who professes the ideology of Marx and Lenin is a true Communist. Lenin himself defined Communism as an international organization, akin to the Mafia, whose members would constitute an elite corps of professional revolutionaries.40 As he described it in 1902, “In form such a strong revolutionary organization in an autocratic country may also be described as a ‘conspiratorial’ organization… such an organization must have the utmost secrecy.”41 Shortly after seizing control of Russia in 1917, Lenin revealed the secret of Communist success in a booklet, declaring that “The Bolsheviks could not have maintained themselves in power... unless the strictest, truly iron discipline prevailed in our Party.”42 Naive believers in Marxist ideology are constantly purged from the Party, for the organization can rely only on those people blindly willing to obey orders.43 Communism explicitly disavows all moral rules, and its members must constantly shift tactics, sometimes even carry out seemingly anti-
-Marxist actions, as its leadership adapts the revolution to changing circumstances.44 Thus Communists possess the fanatic discipline needed to carry out deception on a scale beyond the imagination of most outsiders, including staging their own alleged “collapse.”
Something many conservative have said for years - especially the part that socialism only works when its in a small voluntary enterprise like a church operation or small country in Europe.