We are at max depth but to address the perceived lack of a shred of capitalism in the USSR, I can't help but point to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy which was espoused by Lenin himself and included a large component of free market capitalism. It was the efforts undertaken by Stalin in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivization_in_the_Soviet... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization that saw the official state endorsement of capitalism expire. You can see what the effects of that were https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Soviet_Union#/m... and draw your own conclusions.

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Note that I thought this comment chain was at max reply depth, this comment was a reply to scotty79 not the parent.

I agree there was some capitalism, as there is components of it in every economy. Similarly, every economy has mixtures of other systems in it. The issue is how much of the various systems an economy allows. Certainly Soviet Russia was not considered a capitalist system, whereas most of Western Europe and the US were during that period.

Your link provides a nice graph [1] showing that USSR and many countries that were capitalist had similar GDP per capita in 1913, but diverged wildly over the following years. I suspect academic has such a graph including more countries along with some rating of how the underlying economic system worked. It would be interesting to see that. I am aware of a decent amount of economic literature that does credit capitalism as a major force for pulling billions out of poverty.

Your page seems to back up my point, does it not?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Soviet_Union_USSR_GDP_per...

My reply was intended for the other person who replied to you. For some reason I did not see a reply button so I thought we were at max depth.

I believe that the graph does in fact support your conclusions.

Can you recommend any good books on the subject?

I think russia did very well, even better than USA when it brought electricity, modern housing and basic education to rural populace. All without shread of capitalism. What ultimately killed communism was exclusion of russia from global technological progress. When there's no tech advancement central planning is way less efficient in running things. But when you just got new tech and need to undertake huge infrastructural projects to spread it I think that central planning has some advantages over capitalism thanks to not requiring having capital or not bothering about immediate profitability or not having to ensure that same entity that invests gets ultimate benefit out of the investment.