Why was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) called that when they were communists?
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Short answer – In the USSR’s ideology, communism was seen as the long-term goal, and socialism the path to get there.
The long answer is philosophy and ideology. The USSR followed a sub-ideology of communism called Marxism-Leninism or Vanguardism. Vanguardists believe that communism is a utopian society where everyone contributes as much as they can and get as much as they need, without need for money. They call themselves communists because their goal is said communist utopia.
Vanguardists also believe that the way to achieve said communist utopia is via a vanguard party, which (violently) seizes the state in a revolution, and then runs the state in an authoritarian manner to reorganize society into one where communism is possible. The Vanguardist plan for achieving communism is to first do what is called “state capitalism”, i.e. the state owns all of the factories, businesses, etc directly and employs the people – this with the primary purpose of modernizing society to make socialism possible*.
State capitalism would then lead into socialism as the economy modernized, socialism in this case meaning that the workers owned and controlled the factories etc directly, rather than being employed by the state. Here’s where the waters get muddled a bit, because (especially post-Stalin) the USSR considered itself as having achieved socialism (even though according to the original definition they really hadn’t). As a result, they called their nations socialist, because that’s what they considered themselves to be achieved. They called themselves communists, because a communist economy was the ultimate long-term goal of their economy.
*Under traditional Marxist thinking, socialism is considered to be impossible until you have had capitalism for a while, because capitalism is good at industrializing and building up a modern economy, which socialism can then turn more fair. Marxism-Leninism was adapted for the (at the time) still pretty feudal and agrarian Russia, by having an authoritarian state rather than the market performing this capitalist step.
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