Were Lenin and Stalin actually communists/leftists?

Hey guys,In another subreddit, I got engaged in a discussion about the political compass. Some guy posted this link that shows Lenin and Stalin on the far left and I posted the 2 replies below. Instead of having a discussion about what I said, I got downvoted and got no replies whatsoever. I am no expert in politics and I would love to hear opinions if I'm wrong or not on this subject in order to better understand it.Looking forward to hearing from you, thanks!POST 1:I wouldn't position Lenin and Stalin that much on the far left though as they were not as communist and didn't promote common ownership as much as their party name suggests. They were rather encouraging some sort of state capitalism...https://ift.tt/2QZTYAk' As a term, state socialism is often used interchangeably with state capitalism in reference to the economic systems of Marxist–Leninist states such as the Soviet Union to highlight the role of state planning in these economies, with the critics of said system referring to it more commonly as state capitalism.[8] Democratic and libertarian socialists claim that these states had only a limited number of socialist characteristics. '' Those socialists who oppose any system of state control whatsoever believe in a more decentralized approach which puts the means of production directly into the hands of the workers rather than indirectly through state bureaucracies[40][41][42] which they claim represent a new elite or class.[71][72][73][74] This leads them to consider state socialism a form of state capitalism[75] (an economy based on centralized management, capital accumulation and wage labor, but with the state owning the means of production)[76] which Engels stated would be the final form of capitalism rather than socialism.[77] Furthermore, nationalization and state ownership have nothing to do with socialism by itself, having been historically carried out for various different purposes under a wide variety of different political and economic systems.[78] 'POST 2:Any arguments for down voting? lol...Also note that the values of left encourage social equality and egalitarianism in opposition to social hierarchy (which is more related to the Right) . What the so called 'communist' states did was to create an elite class where the leader had a cult of personality around him (that's very much social hierarchy) . This authoritarianism and often lack of rights for the commoners ( voting to chose the leader or to chose anything was often if not always rigged ) is very much anti socialistic. Marx himself considered communism to be 'a classless, STATELESS, humane society based on common ownership and distribution based on one's needs..Here's a quote from https://ift.tt/13z3BrT :' Along with social democracy, communism became the dominant political tendency within the international socialist movement by the 1920s.[8] While the emergence of the Soviet Union as the world's first nominally communist state led to communism's widespread association with the Soviet economic model and Marxism–Leninism,[1][a][9] some economists and intellectuals argued that in practice the model functioned as a form of state capitalism,[10][11][12] or a non-planned administrative or command economy.[13][14] 'Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending the communist ideology or something, all I'm saying is that Lenin and Stalin were not 'communist' as Marx defined it and generally not even that 'left' on the political compass as people think even though they made people think that they actually are.Before getting downvoted to hell once again, I would love to hear some arguments, cheers! via /r/communism https://ift.tt/3bucNVI