>So people who advocated for communism had to somehow find a way to assure people that the communism they were preaching wasn't the same thing as the system down the road that couldn't feed anyone and was riddled with secret police.
This is a very cynical view, and does a disservice to the spirit of intellectual pursuit in normative social theory. The idea that the only reason why they would oppose such examples of communism is out of embarrassment doesn't fit well with their actual criticisms and reference to Marx himself. Thorough examination of Marx's notebooks and ancillary works only began in the 60s in English language literature. Your suggestion makes even less sense when one considers that the modern left critique of capitalism (usually focusing on concepts such as domination and totality) could be (and were) equally applied to the USSR.
This takes a much different form to deviationism. Deviationism is a result of party politics. It isn't a result of theoretical work. For example, many of the criticisms I mentioned in my other comment in this thread have not come from Trotskyists, Maoists, Titoists or any other "-ist"!
>The idea that the only reason why they would oppose such examples of communism is out of embarrassment
I was thinking it was more that the X I believe in is good, Y is bad but says they are X I better devote some resources to explaining why Y is not X lest people get the wrong idea.
This is a very cynical view, and does a disservice to the spirit of intellectual pursuit in normative social theory. The idea that the only reason why they would oppose such examples of communism is out of embarrassment doesn't fit well with their actual criticisms and reference to Marx himself. Thorough examination of Marx's notebooks and ancillary works only began in the 60s in English language literature. Your suggestion makes even less sense when one considers that the modern left critique of capitalism (usually focusing on concepts such as domination and totality) could be (and were) equally applied to the USSR.
This takes a much different form to deviationism. Deviationism is a result of party politics. It isn't a result of theoretical work. For example, many of the criticisms I mentioned in my other comment in this thread have not come from Trotskyists, Maoists, Titoists or any other "-ist"!