So there’s not a lot of “popular history” of this kind of stuff in the West.

I’ve gotten a lot of this knowledge mostly by studying history and reading the works of Marx/Lenin/Trotsky/Mao. You can get a lot of really good basic info if you study the Sino-Soviet Split (The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World)

For specific recommendations that are accessible:

Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party - Good primer about global communist development

The New Class by Milovan Djilas - this is the OG book of “I’ve been trying to build this shit and I’m mad at what we’ve built” Conversations with Stalin by Milovan Dijas is also a good read because it really explains the reality of the consequences of USSR foreign policy in places where it needed to succeed the most in real communism building ways and not in “fight America” ways.

Also if you read The New Class absolutely must read The New Industrial State and the Affluent Society by Gailbraith because the entirety of the structure of Djilas and Gailbraith lines up, you start to see the patterns that are literally about industrial production as a social process in and of itself has hard problems that were solved in almost the exact same ways on both sides of the Iron Curtain, leading to similar outcomes of social stratification, one capitalist and one communist.

Other than that back copies of Comparative Communist Studies and Communist and Post Communist Studies from JSTOR or however you can get academic publications have been really interesting to me.