For example?
One issue with apartheid is that it essentially withheld education from the black population. Sure, it had schools for them, but they were nothing like the standard of the schools for white children.
So what's an example of a country with an essentially uneducated population of tens of millions who "bounced back(?) faster"?
(I'm German, in case that matters).
Looking at contemporary Poland, one would hardly believe that the country was a heap of ruins and dead bodies mere three generations ago.
They literally built everything after the war and transformed Poland in a country where no one was jobless or homeless a decade after ww2.
Socialism was a godsend (socially and economically) in after-war Poland and so was getting rid of it 4 decades later and later joining the EU.
Don't lecture me on "socialism being a godsend". I saw it with my own eyes. It was a dirty, suffocating, ossified structure where prosperity was a crime, and so was any freedom.
We had martial law between 81 and 83 which made life difficult, as you can imagine a martial law can do, but no one was starving.
You could have bread and milk in the official grocery stores, as long as you were willing to rise early and stand in queue. By 10 am, already sold out.
Buying meat, IIRC, was already somewhat of a challenge. The authorities tried to "re-educate" people towards canned fish.
But the black markets were huge. Impressively huge. You could buy a lot of stuff there, plus sometimes peddlers went door-to-door selling stuff from their backpacks.
Queues existed, this is also true, but again, those were limited to certain rare periods.
Edit: I have completely forget that whole Eastern Block was not allowed to accept Marshall Plan from political reasons and help from Soviets was not really there.
German socialists were rejecting cooperation with Soviet Communists as early as May 1945.
New authentic German parties were organized in June 1945. The CDU was organized (in the Soviet zone) by merging Catholic and Protestant parties that existed in Weimar Germany.
One of the earliest political controversies was whether the surviving July plotters (“Operation Valkyrie”) or Weimar politicians should lead the German people.
The Allied government preferred the Valkyrie plotters. They were sidelined by the politically experienced Weimar politicians.
The Soviets were holding semi-rigged German elections in September 1945. Austria had fair elections by November 1945.
The current German state (“West Germany”) came into existence in 1949. The occupational and autonomous German government existed hand in hand for six years.
It really is amazing how fast “normal politics” resumed in Germany.
To rephrase the question: “is democracy an end itself, and not just a means to better government?”
South Korea. Took them a couple decades to get moving but once they did they took off like a rocket.