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"Sad, as we have, other than political philosophy, much in common "
What you call "differences in political philosophy" is so fundamental [and goes deeper than philosophy] that your hope "one day soon" is best characterized as groundless fantasy, on the lines that "if a granny had different anatomy, she'd have been a grandpa":
There is a school of thought [to which I subscribe] which uses a bit unorthodox definitions and claims that Russia has always been communistic, and does not want [or knows how] to be anything else:
In my sociological analysis of Russia I follow Alexander Zinoviev, since his analysis happens to square with my life experiences there to an uncanny degree. Briefly, Zinoviev [and I after him] considers communism as a way of life which is characterized [like every other way of life] by how people relate to one another and to their groups [ultimately to their society, which is merely the largest and most powerful of these groups] in socially important situations. The best description of this way of life is to be found in a Russian proverb: "Ty nachal'nik - ya der'mo, ya nachal'nik - ty der'mo" [If you're the boss, then I'm POS, and if I'm the boss, then you are POS]. Pretty similar to a very bad Western workplace with a petty boss whose authority has gone to his head, but writ large over the whole society.
Just as capitalism is defined by "monetary/property relationships", so communism is defined by the power relationships of subordination, coordination and domination. While these phenomena could be found in every and any society [money - in the form of coins - is known since about 600 BC, and bosses and subordinates have been around for even longer], in a capitalistic society monetary/property relationships become [for the first time and at the limit, in the abstract] all-important and all-defining; and similarly in communist societies the power relationships - the exercise of naked arbitrary power and the absence of any protection for an individual against it - become all-defining and all-important. Lenin expressed it in his formula "kto kogo" - who is going [or able] to do what to whom.
In this sense communism has absolutely nothing to do with any economic system [since it is a phenomenon in sociological, not economical, sphere] nor with any particular slogans, symbols like red banners or any particular ideology, albeit one could state that developed communist societies do need ideological systems. If so defined, communism [or elements thereof] has been with us since Stone Age, was not invented by Marx and surely predates 1917 revolution in Russia.
Within this framework one could see that mafia families are [distorted] examples of communist type societies, that our own clintons are [or behave like, which is the same] communists, and that such tin-pot places like Idi Amin's Uganda are communist places about as much as North Korea or Cuba. Communist society is normally characterized by very weak or nonexistent forms of social self-defense [rule of law, property rights, publicity - civil society in general]. Historically, none of these were able to take serious root in Russia, which, together with the traditions of brownnosing [to the state] Orthodox church and millenia-old tradition of terroristic and despotic state, make for Russia being a communist or a protocommunist society since at least the times of Ivan the Terrible [16th century, and I would go for the 14th]. More, right now it remains about as communist as ever, with some cosmetical changes.
As an aside, in mid-19 century Karl Marx characterized [tsarist] Russia as "asiatic despotism". As the history has shown us, post-tsarist Russia has been as "asiatic" and as "despotic" as ever, and frequently worse than ever. Marx simply mistook the salient features of a real [?-proto-?]communistic society already in existence under his very nose for some peculiarities of Russia. Later we saw the same "asiatic despotism" manifesting itself in Red China, Cuba, occupied Eastern Europe, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and so on - in and out of Asia.
What is claimed is that this "asiatic despotism" is the definition and the essence of what any real communist society is and looks like.