Your post illustrates quite well the misunderstanding of what communist actually is. It is certainly not about government giving money away.
Classic Communism is a political theory derived from Karl Marx theory in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs. It was a nice idea, but impossible to implement.
There was Communism under Stalin, also know as Stalinism in which Stalin ruled the country with an iron fist. The government controlled or owned almost everything. Farmers and factory workers were provide with food and shelter and little else. Most of the economic production in the country went to supporting a huge military and a system of controlling the lives of workers which required a huge government bureaucracy. There was very little consumer goods produced and most it went to top Party members.
Lastly, there was Communism after Stalin. After Stalin's death there were leaders such as Khrushchev who tried to implement classic communism emphasizing economic production with less control over the lives of the people. He believe he could incentivize workers with propaganda, praising workers for higher production, offering better goverment housing and various perks etc. However, offering monetary incentives or private ownership was unthinkable. Thus Khrushchev's 3 year plans and 5 years plans, all failed measurably. After Khrushchev, hardliners gain control of the government believing that Russia's future depending on outdoing the West militarily. That lead to worse economic failures and finally the breakup of the Soviet Union and the ending of communism in Russia.
Today, the Communist Party is no longer in control of the government and communism has been rejected by most of the people. Russia's economic system now is a mix of a planned economy and a market economy, which some say is a distinct system with its own rules. Although the economy is producing more goods and services for people than every before, real economic freedom is being smothered by the oligarchs and criminal syndicates.
Real Communist as proposed by Marx and Lenin was never really successfully implement in Russia because it does not provide the incentive needed for economic growth. People work for personal economic gain, not for the good others, at least not in this life.