Except for the part that the proletariat ruled nothing in Soviet Russia, and all the power was in the hands of a permanent party aristocracy.
The party was conceived as the vanguard of the working class, that is the most "class-conscious" (in really vulgar terms: the most Marxist) section of it. This is also Marx, though Lenin deepened the concept.
The state gave itself instruments of proletarian rule in the form of the soviets, to which only soldiers, peasants and workers could participate, excluding priests and all sections of the population which had unearned forms of income. Until at least the late '20s, maybe mid '30s, the Soviet state was based in these formations.
And the state doing everything but withering away.
Can't wither away in a single state lacking self-sufficiency. In order to speak of a stateless society we have to speak of a classless society, and the proletarian dictatorship, by virtue of being the dictatorship of one class (the proletariat) over the rest of society, is still a class society. The proletariat must abolish itself by abolishing all other classes.
How does the proletariat abolish itself? By centralizing all economic enterprise in the hands of its state, thus wiping out the bourgeoisie as a class.
What follows then is the abolition of wage labor itself, which is the condition that distinguishes the proletariat, a condition which can be traced to the relation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat but which can be perpetuated by the state itself. But, as the proletariat abolishes wage labor, it abolishes itself, and thus the foundation of the state it rules through its vanguard. Without a class to rule it with, the state itself becomes redundant, and can only cease to exist afterwards.
In a country lacking self-sufficiency, wage labor and the profit motive itself have to be perpetuated in order to survive. The country, even under proletarian rule, has to perpetuate some form of wage labor and mercantilism in order to acquire what it needs from other countries.
To make a really long story short, a Marxist would tell you that one can only afford to speak of an elimination of the state when there will be no other states aside from the proletarian one. Until the whole world is a single proletarian dictatorship, or some form of it, because only the entire world's resources, by definition, can make an entire society self-sufficient to the point of entirely doing away with wage labor and mercantile logics, including the use of money itself which, from a Marxist perpective, is seen as the king of all commodities.
Pilsudski placed a wrench in all this, he locked the Soviet state to Russia, preventing it from assisting or reviving the revolutions that had died down in Western Europe. If Tukhachevsky would've known of the cracked ciphers...
Funny thing is that, from a purely Marxist point of view, a communist revolution in a Russia that was still largely agrarian wasn't even supposed to happen.
No, the country had a working class, it was merely underdeveloped owing to the underdeveloped state of capitalism in Russia. It doesn't matter, it was enough to seize power, and from there work towards its own expansion as a class. This was what the NEP was for.
Note that the matter here isn't agrarian or industrial, but wage labor vs anything else, because it isn't industry that defines the proletariat as a class. This is why, during the NEP, an agricultural bourgeoisie AND agricultural proletariat emerged, while a significant portion of the land was directly nationalized afterwards, turning its workers into agricultural wage earners, in other words a rural proletariat.
Collectivization and the establishment of the kolhoz enterprise was something else, a half-measure Stalin took not to piss off the agricultural bourgeoise that the NEP created. He couldn't or wouldn't nationalize their land, so he collectivized it. We know how that went.
Lenin was opposed to taxation which is part of the ten planks of communism. From a Marxist perspective, Lenin did plenty wrong.
Taxation can't exist in a communist society, by definition. There's no state and no money, which means no state to pay taxes to and no money to pay them with. There may or may not exist some form of taxation in the transitional society in which the state is there but is in its withering process, but in the intended communist society there would be no such thing.
Marx opposed taxation as far back as 1848, when during the revolts in Germany called on citizens not to pay taxes. Critique of the Gotha Programme , dated 1875, also criticizes Lassalle stating:
That, in fact, by the word "state" is meant the government machine, or the state insofar as it forms a special organism separated from society through division of labor, is shown by the words "the German Workers' party demands as the economic basis of the state: a single progressive income tax", etc. Taxes are the economic basis of the government machinery and of nothing else. In the state of the future, existing in Switzerland, this demand has been pretty well fulfilled. Income tax presupposes various sources of income of the various social classes, and hence capitalist society. It is, therefore, nothing remarkable that the Liverpool financial reformers — bourgeois headed by Gladstone's brother — are putting forward the same demand as the program.
