Quick debunking of the "that wasn't true communism" meme

The neo communists like to repeat the "that wasn't true communism" meme to oblivion. As someone who spent his childhood under one of those not-so-real-communist regimes my childhood I can see what is wrong with this claim with ease. Let me entertain just one argument that does not require deep knowledge of our recent history tho. Approximately half of the world's population lived under communism until the 1990's. As any governmental system the authorities in these countries were recruiting people to do the planning for how and where the state would move. There was more or less a system of meritocracy in choosing the rulers of these countries too(we can all agree that never goes just one way-full nepotism or full meritocracy). Communist countries had intelligentsia that was in no way worse than the one the West had. Given how one of the most prominent American thinkers of the 80's was Camille Paglia with her "deep analysis" of the works of....yes, Madonna, I'd say ideological rigor actually did a huge favour to the East. Now if you think of this-selected from 2 bill + people that's awful lot of smart, little cogs in the wheels of the communist machine. And all these cogs have read and well understood the works of Marx and Engels. Now how did none of these thousands and thousands of really smart people not understand their countries only call themselves communist but are in fact on wrong track? Well, if you read even a tiny bit of history of these countries(and this tells you how "well read" the neo commies are) you would know and understand why that was. But if you are a know-it-all 19 year old you think that you actually vastly exceed all these people and you understand the world better than they did. This is the only logical explanation of the "that wasn't true communism" meme-you know it all and they didn't. The fact that just a tiny drop of self reflection should make you step back and look at your argument from more than one angle but they fail to do it is telling of the integrity and cognitive ability of those throwing it around.