being imposed by said authoritarian government.
Unless everyone agrees about everything, or there is a system in place to enforce whatever behaviors are arrived at as the societal standards and everyone agrees to be a good sport about that, there is always going to be a governmental body that enforces things by means of violence or the threat of violence.
Putin's totalitarian regime enforces an economic model of "all wealth intentionally gets routed to a small group of elite old men" and private ownership of the means of production and distribution.
In the U.S., we have capitalism written into our laws and firmly established as the enforced economic system; despite conservatives getting bent out of shape about things like basic human needs ever being subsidized by the state in any way, this is under no threat of being changed by either of the main political parties, nor is it really threatened in any meaningful way by any third party contenders at this point. And "corporate rights" are always prioritized over human needs--we have arranged things to serve the constant circulation of capital and accumulation of wealth rather than serving the needs of the population, and it's enforced by violence whenever challenged.
So just assuming there's always some kind of authoritarianism, and assuming good intentions on at least the original founders of communist movements in Russia, there was some point when the USSR could reasonably claim to be aiming toward a communist society--obviously it didn't work out that way, but I think at least there was some evidence that they were trying and had non-selfish intentions.
You can't say that about the current regime. It is plainly kleptocratic, and ostensibly capitalist at any rate (the West "won the Cold War" after all).
Yet some people still refer to Russia as if it were the USSR. Why?
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