What I mean is that, lacking any other info, communist does not automatically equal authoritarian. There is a tragic amount of overlap between those two Ven diagram circles but it is not an intrinsic thing is all I’m pointing out. Of course I know nothing about the specifics of this situation in particular, and I’m not so arrogant as to talk as though I do. I’m just making a general point.
I mean, the sea is hardly the same colour as the sky either (usually) and yet we still call both those blue so it’s not all that different. Though I agree that it seems like starker difference to me I can acknowledge that’s at least partially my own biases.