Russia made gigantic leaps from 1917 to 1956. They went from absolute backwards shithole to contending world power in 39 years (even less considering ww2 was over 10 years before that).

They did so at tremendous human cost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921%E2%80%9... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1946%E2%80%93...

You're talking like they didn't get invaded by the germans and lost 20M comrades vs the "atrocious war crimes against the jews" that totalled 6M... Russia took a beating and basically stop the german progress for the WEST to be able to regroup and refight way later.

Please understand that I'm not trying to be argumentative; I believe this is a widely misunderstood era of Soviet history. The Holodomor and the 1921 famine predate the Barbarossa invasion significantly. The Holodomor was a product of the dekulakization efforts undertaken as part of the forced farm collectivization. The farm collectivization was driven in part by Stalin's ideology (he disliked the NEP for various reasons) and partly by the need to maintain hard currency levels to purchase machine tools etc from foreign states to maintain its industrialization push. The main exports of the USSR were grain and therefore the quotas were enforced by the NKVD at the expense of the lives of a large number of people. In certain areas, Stalin was persuaded to lower the quotas but in the geographical confines of the Holodomor (largely Ukraine SSR) the quotas were largely maintained. Historians still debate whether the Holodomor was an intentional act of genocide (because Stalin wanted to crush any independence movement within Ukraine SSR) or simply depraved indifference. Conservative estimates of the cost of the Holodomor vary from 3.3-6+ million dead.

You implicitly posed an interesting moral question. Can history justify the deaths of 3.3-6+ million (Holodomor), 4+million (dekulakization), 5 million (1921 famine, admittedly coincident with the civil war) when compared to the planned atrocities of the Nazis if we credit those deaths with greatly contributing towards the defeat of the Hitler and the NSDAP?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan

Fighting a war on two fronts did Germany in. Do some research on what contributed to that 20m and you’ll soon realize the number didn’t have to be nearly that high. Stalin was a political genius, but almost as atrocious as Hitler when it came to human rights

What happened after 1956?

Can you provide me one or two examples from this set? I found a list on Wikipedia [0] of currently non-capitalist countries and many of them sound like perfectly nice places, but I am not aware of when they all "industrialized" and what their socioeconomic climate was like at the time and it seems like drilling deeper is going to require a lot of research. So an example or two that you know about would be helpful.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anti-capitalist_and_co...

Not all of these countries are "non-capitalist." This is a list of parties that are anti-capitalist/communist, some with only one or two seats in their country's parliament.

The introduction to the article even makes this clear:

> Of the 66 states listed here, 9 of them are republics ruled by a socialist, communist or anticapitalist party, five of them are official socialist states ruled by a communist party, of them four of them espouse Marxism–Leninism (China, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam) while the fifth (North Korea) espouses Juche.

You are probably looking for the current article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_state#List_of_curren..., or the historical article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states.

Like I said, much deeper research ;)

Thanks for the links, they are a much better jumping off point. I cross-referenced [0] with the tables on [1] and population data from [2] to build this list for further analysis:

    Country             *ist since          Total wealth (USD)      Mean wealth/adult (USD)     Median wealth/adult (USD) 
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    China               1 October 1949      29,000 billion          26,872                      6,689
                    Pop 2017: 1.386 billion      Pop 1949: 542 million*          Pop growth/year:  12.41 million
                    
    Laos                2 December 1975     22 billion              5,662                       1,382
                    Pop 2017: 6.758 million      Pop 1975: 3.042 million         Pop growth/year:  88,476

    Vietnam             2 July 1976         358 billion             5,391                       2,235
                    Pop 2017: 95.54 million      Pop 1976: 49.81 million         Pop growth/year:  1.12 million

    Bangladesh          11 April 1971       263 billion             2,612                       1,587
                    Pop 2017: 164.67 million     Pop 1971: 66.42 million         Pop growth/year:  2.14 million

    Guyana              6 October 1980      2 billion               5,345                       2,510
                    Pop 2017: 777,859            Pop 1980: 780,153               Pop growth/year:  -62

    India               18 December 1976    4,987 billion           8,976                       4,295
                    Pop 2017: 1.339 billion      Pop 1976: 635.77 million        Pop growth/year:  17.15 million

    Nepal               20 September 2015   40 billion              2,392                       1,151
                    Pop 2017: 29.30 million      Pop 2015: 28.66 million         Pop growth/year:  320,000

    Portugal            2 April 1976        750 billion             89,437                      38,242
                    Pop 2017: 10.29 million      Pop 1976: 9.4 million           Pop growth/year:  21,707

    Sri Lanka           7 September 1978    68 billion              4,802                       2,448
                    Pop 2017: 21.44 million      Pop 1978: 14.53 million         Pop growth/year:  177,179

    Tanzania            26 April 1964       22 billion              858                         510
                    Pop 2017: 57.31 million      Pop 1964: 11.34 million         Pop growth/year:  867,358

    *https://countryeconomy.com/demography/population/china?year=1949

    Missing data for: Cuba, North Korea

Then I noticed the information at [2] could be remixed in several interesting ways. Looking at charts like [3] and [4] was illuminating. It seems like the "outcomes" of some of these countries are not unfavorable, depending, of course, on what metric you choose to measure.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_state#List_of_curren...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...

[2] https://data.worldbank.org

[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.KD?location...

[4] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...

While china is ruled by a nominally communist party, its party is definitely undergoing deliberative market reforms that are inspired by western capitalism.