This... this is the same 'communist' economy which openly declared that one-man direction in the workplace was the founding principle of socialism?
Yep, exactly those guys. Again he was authoritarian as fuck, but it's not like the USSR Communists invented authoritarian socialism; that was already a thing by that point. One can be a socialist without believing in democracy.
Because they... reduced peasants and proletariat into the position of effective serfdom under a bureaucratic despotism not dissimilar to pre-modern regimes like Confucian China...?
Premodern China had private property, though, which is the crux of the thing here. Political systems and economic systems influence each other, but in terms of categorization they're more or less orthogonal.
That's... that's what preparation for communism looks like to you?
I mean it's not my idea of preparation for communism, but it's an idea of preparation for communism. Industrialization and modernization as prerequisites wouldn't have been particularly controversial. From there the only logical leap needed is "you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs" and "if we don't hurry they'll fucking kill us" (which is basically what happened). Again I don't agree with the logic, but it does exist and doesn't outwardly contradict socialist ideas if you're willing to take a far-more-than-healthy dose of "the ends justify the means."
This can't be fucking serious.
...why?