Yes, the system was capable in many areas (although that wasn't enough overall). The socialism is designed to please the majority, first and foremost, so it nor

Yes, the system was capable in many areas (although that wasn't enough overall). The socialism is designed to please the majority, first and foremost, so it normal to see that in USSR they addressed a lot of the common people issues that under a different establishment may have been addressed in a lesser degree. The industrialization happened, as I see it, because was an answer to several issues at once: a mean to employ masses, a mean to provide various resources thus a politically desirable and reasonably easy achievable economic independence (as before the industrialization the main exported commodity from USSR was wheat), and on ideological level - a way of depicting the viability of communism (having the industrialized nations as reference, nations that happened to be all capitalist). As for scientific progress, in USSR it had to have an ideological base (as it has to have an economical base in capitalism), and from this I see two occurring issues. First issue is that it works best when you have to compete with something other than yourself (like politically dictated/mandated cosmos-related scientific progress) and not so much otherwise, and the second issue is that things don't get multiplied the way they do in capitalist environment because things here happen when they are commissioned by the state (thus only one) actor and resource pool. (To be fair, I don't see anything serious impeding scientific progress in socialism/communism, just fewer reasons for it to happen.)