It's difficult to engage with that question directly and as stated in a way which doesn't involve providing seven pages of nuanced historic context. Worse yet, a lot of well-meaning leftists reflexively backslide into defending some of the worst excesses of both the Chinese and Soviet states which do rightly deserve condemnation (or, alternatively only focusing on European style socialism while ignoring the USSR and China altogether).

Now if you're anarchist this problem resolves itself pretty easily, the organization of people into states is really the bigger problem here. That is, you cannot have a state which abuses its power in an authoritarian way if you don't have a state to begin with. Perhaps we ought to organize power horizontally and limit the scope of decision making power to the communities and workplaces that will be most directly affected by said decisions.

I love me a big beautiful state though. And, as you might have gathered I like writing seven pages of anything at a time. So my practical advice here is to provide fair historical context for the cases cited while remaining critical of that which you ought to be critical of. Nothing is ever as uncomplicated as 'X' Ideology did this or 'Z' Ideology did that, history is a process and not a scorecard. History can only be useful in understanding current conditions and trends if you actually root distinct historic episodes in their proper context and understand the ways in which those contexts differ from the present.