To give you some idea: if you want to start a company, it will take you a minimum of 40 days to visit various bureaucrats and get permissions.
When you hire employees they will come with union strings and have a Soviet-era worker mindset (i.e., they can do whatever work they want, incompetently or not, and they still expect to get paid, etc.), which is probably where the phrase comes from.
The Calomiris article goes into more detail.
"Mildly socialist, corrupt and inefficient" is how any economist who has a brain, local or otherwise, would describe it.
"Stalinist" is for Sarah Palin, the Tea Party and other groups who are more concerned with "impact words" than actually understanding anything.
EDIT: Just to make it more clear how inaccurate and inflammatory that comparison is, Stalin by many estimates killed more people than Hitler. I'll repeat that. Stalin by many estimates killed more people than Hitler. Want to rethink the comparison maybe?
Their references to that term allude to red tape on a large scale, centralized economic planning, indifferent and unmotivated labor, etc., not the death camps and killing.
(And that last phrase reminded me of this: http://bit.ly/bh96ml apropos of nothing).
PS funny skit
It runs deeper than that: Greece is the last Stalinist economy in Europe (despite never being behind the Iron Curtain).
The government is so massively bureaucratic and corrupt that most people there consider it foolish to pay taxes to such an entity.
This article goes into the background, and, on a hopeful note, suggests how that could change in the future: http://www.aei.org/article/101804