Reflection Time

So what went wrong in the USSR? Depending on who you talk to, they either loved it or hated it. How come areas, like Poland were exceptionally more poor than others?

Well they didn't kill enough Ukrainians for one

Stalin Ruined Everything.

Didn't he build like, everything?

No, the workers did.

Yes but wasn't it under his administration?

Nah, that was coincidental. You see, workers were suddenly overcome with the urge to build things and Stalin was simply around.

On a slightly more serious note

tl;dr: revisionism.

I really need to make an infographic.

1) After WWII was over, new generation of Marxists was partially wiped out (cue losses of Communist party members on the frontline).
2) On the other hand, Party was overrun by people with rudimentary understanding of Marxism (cue sources of immense amount of new members joining during WWII).
3) Post-war Bolsheviks could not present unified front and educate new people in Marxism (cue long explanation of why populists won).
4) Bureaucrats came to power and (effectively) begun transition to Capitalism. Due to built-in legal defences against this, it took 30 years and several coups to accomplish (cue long long list of shit that happened)
5) Since Capitalism doesn't actually work, Soviets were getting less and less efficient as time went on.

Poland wasn't part of USSR, for starters. It was semi-independent nation ruled by their own elites. Like right now with EU/NATO. Except Communist politicians are in charge, not Liberal (Euro-Liberal, not US-Liberal, if that's not obvious). Some nations had politicians with brains, some nations didn't (Hungary went full retard, for example).

Additional factors:
1) Poland was never particularly rich (same for Hungary/Romania/Bulgaria)
2) WWII destroyed quite a lot
3) Poland went Communist kinda late and didn't get the full industrialization course under Stalinist economists, instead they've got revisionist (and politically correct) version from Khruschev-Brezhnev.

PREACH

USSR had its problems, it wasn't some communist utopia.
But I always see people pointing to the problems of the USSR as if it had all of the problems of our society today WITH those additional problems on top.
Now, I wasn't there, I wasn't even alive during the Cold War, but consider that perhaps it wasn't better or worse than our capitalist society. It lacked some of the problems we have and had problems we don't. People need to stop imagining a different society through their own ideological lenses. If the soviets had of "won" the Cold War, they would probably describe western society the same way that the USSR is described by those in the west today.

Stalin is the only reason the entire soviet union didn't collapse during the 30's