A centralized state ruled by a party is not the commonly understood sense, or people would think that all dictatorships are communist, which they don't. In either case, it is bizarre to try to correct the record with something that is in and of itself a misunderstanding.

The Bolsheviks were very forthcoming. They professed from even before the revolution that they were aiming for a pretty centralized state ruled by a vanguard party. They never pretended anything else. It is only after the death of Lenin that they started diverging more and more from what they originally professed.

Kropotkin was critical of the Bolsheviks from before the revolution and actually became more amicable to them after the revolution than before. Indeed he found the fact that they had managed to lead a revolution to be a profound good for humanity that would, in his own words, "enlighten the path of the civilised countries for at least a century", and agreed that the Bolsheviks were communists just as well as him, only that they would be eventually unsuccessful.

In any case, the sense the word is understood by many at this time is itself a misunderstanding. There is a reason why China agrees that their system is not communism, and indeed the word is still used in the way it was intended originally by a great many people. Taking it to be the common sense in English instead of the correct sense is to be in error.