When "no u" weighs the same as the original comment, it's exactly what should be answered.
About that link:
I've read more about USSR than I'd want to remember, and Gorbachev alone as a personality is just a part of the whole tendency. A face of a class, if you will.
The part about comparisons and currencies is simply illiterate - a fixed legally defined exchange rate doesn't mean that we can multiply USD of the time by that and get a correct representation, obviously.
It doesn't matter how much USSR produced of which on paper. It matters (probabilistically) which percentage of it was lost due to bad logistics, which percentage of it would be broken fresh from the factory, and how much would be given for it in a real market.
FFS, I'm not that much against the USSR, I like how some things (like technical education) were done there and I know that it wasn't some horde or an evil empire or even a dictatorship. But people here take such an amazingly arrogant, ignorant and sectarian approach to argument, that I find myself arguing against it by instinct.