YO writing a paper on communism and need to find the source for where lenin said the USSR was not communist/socialist...

MLs pls leave

I think there is a simple linguistic confusion when people talk about socialist/communist/monarchist/other-ist groups, in that a party that describes itself as …-ist stands for goals of that …-ism, that is, the name is about striving to get there, it doesn't imply that you are there. E. g. if the Party of Christian Bores has an overwhelming majority and rules for some years, that doesn't mean society works according to the goals for society espoused by that party.

The way different people argue about communism makes apparent they don't have a shared definition. This doesn't just apply to debates of conservatives versus Marxists, but also among self-identified Marxists.

One short and seemingly straightforward definition: Communism is when the people doing the work control what they produce and how they produce it. But this gets you to the question what "they" means here. Surely not individuals. There are just so many steps and separate tasks in modern production (and this was already true 200 years ago), when can you say somebody really individually makes something from beginning to end? If "they" refers to all of humanity, some might argue that this sort of "communism" has been always the case then, with some strained talk about people doing the "work" of taking risks regarding their property. So, what is it? The local majority within a place of work, something between ten and a thousand, deciding for themselves, being responsible for themselves, these decentralized units independent from each other? But then, how do the relations between these production units work?

Capitalism has two aspects: 1. Control over the means of production by a minority that squeezes the majority and 2. the market relations between the production units and the market pressure to expand if you don't want to die.

If you see human progress not as a monotonic story, where the direction of a small chunk of the path just looks like a model of the shape and direction of the whole path (like a black pixel going through stages of dark grey and less dark grey, and so on, to white), if you see it as very different patterns that society must go through even though on the surface it looks contradictory, such as moving towards less equality and then towards more equality, then you can be a communist (as in having the goal), while your short-term actions on the surface seem to contradict this. This is how one may defend Lenin's New Economic Policy (there are quotes from that time about state capitalism), which plenty of voices from across the political spectrum would rather interpret as Lenin admitting that communism fails or being a fake communist.

It's fine to criticize markets, they really do suck. But please stop conflating them with capitalism; markets have existed for millennia before capitalism was even invented.

And still they differentiate between early and late stage, and that was my point.

As the basis for an entire mode of production? Capitalism is the reduction of the human community to the market itself. Marx points this out when he obviously sees that markets have existed outside of capitalism, but also that they then operated on primitive accumulation, which can essentially be seen as the predecessor to proper capitalistic accumulation as we know it today. Capitalism is then birthed through a bourgeois revolution, which with it takes the essence of this and turns it into a new mode of production based strictly on production for market exchange and the institution of private property necessary to be purposed for that.

There is a difference between "socialism is not communism, it's its own thing" and "socialism is synonymous with lower phase communism". Marx called it the lower phase, Lenin called it the intermediary phase, Bordiga called it ration communism, etc., but none called socialism anything but an underdeveloped communism as such.

Lenin oftentimes used the term socialism to describe the process of moving beyond capitalism, which would make any measure aimed towards that goal socialist. Hence, the USSR during Lenin's life could be considered socialist in the sense that it was a society under the control of the working class which considered transcending capitalism to be its eventual goal. However, he did not believe that the reality of the Soviet state apparatus or economy in the USSR were non-capitalist or could be within any reasonable amount of time. Therefore, he proposed far-reaching changes and goals shortly before his death which were subsequently ignored by everyone. Consider the following documents:
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/jan/23.htm
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/mar/02.htm
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/jan/06.htm
First of all, Lenin is very critical of the Soviet state apparatus and the role of the party within it, suggesting a large scale restructuring which never happened. He's also rather pessimistic about Russia's potential to really get any genuine socialist development going on account of it being a backwards shithole with no support and many enemies now that the European Revolutions have failed.
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Now, the last source is particularly interesting, as Lenin speaks of what the USSR should be doing in order to move towards socialism under their present circumstances. What is he described is almost the opposite of what actually ended up happening, as he starts channeling the spirit of Richard Wolff and proposes the structuring of the USSR as a vast collection of cooperative societies within a state-controlled capitalist system run by the workers themselves.
Might have gone slightly beyond the boundaries of your question there, but this should be a good overview of what Lenin thought of the USSR as it was in 1923 and how he believed it should move into the future. Lenin considered the Bolsheviks to be ruling over a capitalist state using a tremendously deficient state apparatus which was overly bureaucratic and does not give sufficient input to workers and too much power to the central party elite. His idea of progress towards socialism in isolated Russia is essentially a sort of strange mixed economy where the capitalist system is controlled by the worker's state and directed towards the good of all by having the workers themselves run it through cooperatives, thereby slowly advancing in the direction of socialism (but not achieving it) over the course of several decades whilst awaiting further revolutions elsewhere which should provide sufficient material means to move on to the totally new stage of economic management that socialism was supposed to be.
Obviously, he's not talking about Stalin's USSR here, because he was already dead by then. But Stalin was very much the avatar of the bureaucracy within the soviet system and Bolshevik party which Lenin constantly attacked throughout these last writings, and considered to be a remnant of the old capitalist state. He also spent much of his final days arguing against Stalin's policies and attempted to have him deposed in his testament. This, combined with his focus on workers' cooperatives as the center of the development of the new society, leads me to very much doubt that he'd have considered Stalin's totally bureaucratic state-planning where Stalin controlled the party and the party controlled the state to be socialism.
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Oh, the greentext is all TL;DR paraphrasing by the way. Direct quotes are marked by quotation marks.

My staring premise is axiom of extensionality. There is no political conotation behind it dont worry.

"You can have HIV for years without any health problems. Stop conflating HIV with AIDS."