What is not generally realized is that Stalin also implemented many psuedo-freemarket incentives to control the Soviet Economy. Read Mancur Olson on how Stalin got his people to produce more for submarket wages. Click Here for book review
Stalin supplied the labor for all businesses in his country as a single entity and set below market wages. But he also created some higher than market rewards for the few, rare top performers. Stalin created a wage arbitrage and the Soviet state was scooping up the differences bet market wages and what the workers were actually paid. Western businesses loved this kind of system and invested in Stalin, giving him steel mills and auto factories. An instant profit and no problems with the unpredictability of a real market economy with real free trade.
Sound familure anyone? But it's about Russia in the 1920s:
"The economy boomed. Food supplies, while not particularly cheap, were available in plentiful supply in all the cities. Shops were filled with consumer goods, and service industries abounded. Freed from the dead hand of total and rigid central planning, the entrepreneurial spirit blossomed among the Russian people. The Russians showed themselves to be as industrious and productive as any of the peoples of the West, once they had the opportunity to earn profits on the market, and once they could own private property and feel a degree of security in its possession."
Useful idiots flooded in also with their technology. Russian nepmen became, I believe, about 40 percent of the economy. But to this day the Marxists' take on the nepmen is "those people who used the economic system for extreme profiteering." Nepmen proved that Russia could be wealthy and prosperous. But the ideologues resented the "capitalist class" and put an end to it.
When will the chi-coms blow the whistle? After they have all our technology, or before?