“Laughably naive. Putin isn’t a communist, Putin is a Putinist.”
They all come out of the Communist power structure that evolved over that last century and is well established.
Your comment probably points to one if the sources of contention within that world.
Nothing that the Putin regime does, none of it’s policies or politics are even remotely congruent with “communist” ideals. Totalitarianism of a completely different stripe? Maybe so... I don’t know. We will all have to wait and see.