People from the Americas always refer to the USSR as THE model for communism, which was horrible in its implementation as a communist system. They also don't consider what happened before the red revolutions that led to the development of communist system. You see the same patterns coming back these days (just like the return of fascism in Europe). History is repeating itself.
Agreed. And, at the risk of being pedantic, Warsaw Pact Communist parties
never presided over communist systems, only over socialist systems (Western academics of the period referred to the study of these countries' economies as studies of "real existing
socialism). As Marxist parties, they believed in state-socialist economies and "dictatorships of the proletariat" which would - eventually - "wither away" leaving communism behind. Never quite happened. Still, it might yet happen in China, Korea, Vietnam or Cuba. I'm not holding my breath waiting, however!
I'd argue that the only examples of large-scale "real existing communism" are Ukraine in the 1920s (before the Red Army crushed the anarchists and replaced anarchist communism with state-socialism) and Catalonia in the 1930s (before the Soviet Union crushed the anarchists and replaced anarchist communism with state-socialism).