> 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.