Read the article I linked above for the answer. Richer countries like the US and western europe industrialized at least a hundred years before. Both the USSR and PRC were largely feudal economies in the early 1900s. But the soviet union (despite starting out from about the same point as Brazil in 1920) caught up to the US within a few decades, beating it to space, and forcing it to allocate tonsof resources to state-run research and development projects.

It wasn't even really the USSR's choice to de-link, it was heavily attacked by all the western countries during it's civil war, and they embargoed the country when they lost. The west rode their hundred-year head start on industrialization and resource advantage from hundreds of years from colonialism and slavery, and also funded the newly defeated fascist countries like germany and japan to become anti-communist bulwarks producing consumer goods.

The PRC has now surpassed the US in most tech sectors, once again proving the superiority of socialism.

You're comparing 300 million and 1500 million people to the entire rest of the world. And in that rest of the world is about 1000 million people with significantly better living conditions, infrastructure, institutions and education, who of course have huge advantages in being able to create advanced technologies.

And even then you're ignoring that there are industries where the Soviet Union and China both managed to become world leaders.

Another thing I thought of randomly: read cj chivers the gun, which compares the development processes of the ak47 vs the ar15, and their histories. It's a microcosm of the superiority of socialist / collective planning vs the shitshow of capitalist profit-driven development.

Of course. The Soviet Union was constantly hounded by the international bourgeoisie since the day of its creation. Here I'm only referencing the lynch-pin of the collapse.

how convenient that I'm currently skimming https://ia801605.us.archive.org/6/items/pdfy-nmIGAXUrq0OJ87zK/Khrushchev%20Lied.pdf

Not OP, but I recall reading an essay by Carlos Martinez where he explained it as the following:

Most people, regardless of what economic system they live in, don’t really have a real understanding of that system. Consider how many people actually understand what “capitalism” is today. While the Soviets did try what they could to educate their people in this regard, it’s kind of a human thing that most people just want to live their lives and aren’t going to bother trying to figure out how they economy around them works.

So even if most people in the USSR didn’t really understand what “socialism” was, they did know that the improvement in their material conditions from the beginning of Stalin’s tenure to the end was truly incredible (and indeed, as impressive as China’s growth has been in recent decades by some measure the USSR under Stalin grew by even greater leaps). For good or ill, they associated the person of Stalin with “socialism” because Stalin was a socialist and Bolshevik revolutionary, and that period saw a massive improvement in their living conditions (WW2 notwithstanding of course).

So by denouncing Stalin, many people in the Soviet Union saw that as a de facto denunciation of socialism, since the two were so closely tied together in their minds. If you equate Stalin with socialism, and the current leaders are denouncing Stalin, then at the very least that will lead to some confused feelings about socialism.

In addition to the recs below, I highly recommend Domenico Losurdo's Stalin: history and critique of a black legend