[pasabagi]

I'm sympathetic to this position, but I don't know if it's the whole story. Russia, before the revolution, was a country of extremes. On the one hand, there were farmers who were living in a similar manner to 5th century peasants. On the other, there were some of the largest industrial complexes in the world.

I think the Soviets did achieve incredible things, but I think that's largely the result of abandoning profit as the sole criterion of whether an activity is worthwhile: capitalist societies tend to spend most of their productive labour on keeping profitable hamster-wheels spinning (like the housing market, for instance).