This question would probably be better suited for r/socialism_101 or the sort. This question has far more to do with political theory than history. I'd be more than happy to answer it myself there :)

One of Engels's and Marx's famous predictions was that the proletarian revolution would not create communism, but it would create the conditions for communism. The worker-run state would triumph globally in this scenario and the state would "wither away" as it was now superfluous in this new socio-economic epoch. So "communism" was the end result of both the revolution and securing it.

All of the Eastern bloc countries during the Cold War were run by Communist parties, but both in state rhetoric and internal conceptualizations, they used the term socialism to describe their socioeconomic system. As good Marxists, they felt that "communism" was something that would arrive after a period of transition. Where the USSR had an impact here was that the Bolsheviks pushed a line that socialism could only be achieved with a Marxist-Leninist political party acting as a midwife to historical development. The nomenclature for these vanguardist parties soon became some variation of "communist" because it differentiated them from other socialist parties (some of whom were quite at odds with Lenin and company) and signaled that the much talked about revolution was now underway.

The continued existence of sundry details like money and wages were regrettable compromises that needed to be made for this utopian future, as did the existence of the state and a party to control it. Communism's arrival in the not too distant future was something that Soviet and Eastern bloc state propaganda emphasized, but state propaganda was always clear to differentiate between existing socialism and future communism. The state was all-powerful under socialism, but it simply did not need to exist in the future when communism had arrived. Khrushchev, for example, predicted that communism would arrive by 1980 in the Soviet sphere, a concrete position that soon became the butt of jokes and something his successors backed away from. Even Khrushchev hedged his rhetoric in this declaration, claiming 1980s communism would be accomplished "in the main," but the final communist utopia of Marx-Engels would still have to be built by that future generation and its successor.

So it is much more useful to think of the term "communist" not in the socioeconomic sense of a society where there is no want and where money is irrelevant, but rather as a political terminology. In this case, referring to communism in Poland or Germany, for instance, is to discuss the political situation of their communist parties, not how much it cost a Syrena or Trabi.