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Technologos comments on Hayekian Prediction Markets? - Less Wrong
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Contrary to what everyone is absolutely certain of, Soviet Union was not an economic disaster.
Russia and Eastern Europe were much poorer than USA and Western Europe before Soviet Union even started. During Communism economic growth in Soviet Union and other Communist countries was quite close to global average - and it doesn't change when you correct for initial income and supposed catch-up effect. The big loser economically were supposedly capitalist countries like India, Chile, Argentina (and most of South America), and UK. The big winner being East Asia, but Western Europe doing somewhat better than average.
There's a helpful scatterplot in the paper linked.
tl;dr Much higher starting point of Western Europe + better than global average growth of Western Europe together created illusion that Communist countries were unusually economically unsuccessful, while in fact they've been fairly unremarkable either way.
I think much of the problem here comes from something of an equivocation on the meaning of "economic disaster." A country can post high and growing GDP numbers without benefiting its citizens as much as a country with weaker numbers; the linked paper notes that
Communism is good at maintaining top-line growth in an economy because it can simply mandate spending. In much the same way as US government spending can directly add to GDP growth (even if incurring substantial debt), the Soviet Union could make massive military expenditures even while running factories that produced goods not based on consumer desires but state beliefs about those desires or needs.
In short, communism was not an economic disaster in that it effectively industrialized a great many nations and brought consistent top-line growth. It was an economic disaster in that state power allowed or created widespread famines and poor production of consumer goods.