Just because the USSR and its allies found it convenient to keep the term 'socialist' in their official names, doesn't mean the rest of us should go along with that. There is a perfectly acceptable, generally understood and basically unambiguous term for their ideology: communism. Which you're welcome to rail against, and the vast majority of American self-proclaimed socialists won't have an issue with that.
I once had a very long argument online with a dude who argued that you couldn't call the Soviets 'communists' because they never actually achieved communism.
That is, his argument was that Arnold Schwarzenegger could not truthfully have claimed to have seen communism with his own eyes as a boy who traveled to the Soviet-occupied portions of his country, in the same way that, I suppose, someone from Denmark could not claim to have seen Nazism with their own eyes during the Nazi occupation of that country. Because the Soviets were Socialists, and never achieved Communism.
For some people, beliefs about Socialism and Communism are consistent only in that they define the terms in whatever way is necessary to win today's point.