“Authoritarian regimes” 🙄 god shut up nerd

To be even handed you could point to science and industry doing exactly the same shit when given a freer hand. Whether it's basically all industrial "accidents" in various and sundry capitalist economies (scare quotes because overriding safety protocols or not doing due dilligence in hiring because money isn't an accident it's social murder), stuff like that super secret American bomb sight being a scam, industrial agriculture everywhere fucking the soil for short term profits, oil spills, the whole climate crisis and burying of it for money etc.

It's sort of difficult to get in the blame game because everything is multifaceted and regardless of whatever theoretical construct presides over everything humans have the same incentives for corruption at lots of levels.

you also need to keep in mind the USSR was huge, completely and utterly fucked up by ww2 after inheriting a Russia completely and utterly fucked by centuries of tyranny and ww1. In a huge empire, rapidly industrialising, that just had millions of people killed and tens of thousands of towns destroyed there are going to be problems. No system is perfect enough to just overrule the material and social damage done during that.

TBH my own take is they did pretty well but centralised management everywhere has a tendency to fuck everything up. Oh to be clear, anything with a single leader is highly centralised. Like tech startups are centralised, most research labs are under the iron grip of a PI and thus centralised (and talk to anyone below tenure on the academic track to learn of the problems there).