The USSR nationalized plenty of formerly-private land and natural resources, but it built its industrial capacity almost entirely from scratch. (At enormous hum

The USSR nationalized plenty of formerly-private land and natural resources, but it built its industrial capacity almost entirely from scratch. (At enormous human cost - which is the only way to uplift an agrarian backwater to modernity in decades instead of centuries.) The factories which were sold as scrap metal to the West for pennies on the dollar were fully public property.