Russia started from a pretty low starting point when Lenin took over.
That's why they were making fast progress - any idiot who doesn't work will increase performance 100% by getting a job.
Just because you take hundreds of millions of people that aren't working and starving to death to working and still starving to death - doesn't mean you did anything particularly useful.
It just means you really fucked things up. China's real growth began with capitalist reform. So did Russias.
Nonworking -> working can describe early soviet industrialization, but it was far more impressive than you're making out - they were first in space for everything up till 69.
Also, going from the everyday puddling to big science projects can also be described as nonworking->working. If government taxes landowners more thoroughly and invests in big science instead, you can consider that as nw->w.