"That state capacity put the communist nations well ahead of many countries in Africa and Asia that are still less developed today than the average Warsaw Pact country in the 1970s."

East Germany, Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary were more developed than many countries in Africa and Asia today in the 1930s before they had communism forced on them by the Red Army. The standard of living in West Germany was leagues ahead of that of East Germany. The West Germans were building Porsches in 1949, and the East Germans were forming the Stasi.

Finland came within a breath of becoming a communist republic in the USSR during their Civil War and during their invasion by the Soviets. Does anyone really believe that they would have been a better country if that had happened?