There was a lot of homegrown research too, and they put people in space before the US managed it.

Comment above claimed that only under capitalism can we have nice things, which is a blatant lie. Arguably it's due to central planning and a high degree of enforced conformism that China manages to keep up with mass surveillance and production output.

Personally I'm not particularly fond of the state and very suspicious of the presumed necessity to have one.

There were a lot more homegrown research than even you believe, but socialism doesn't reward risk-taking, and it doesn't reward improvements in work culture (because both increase economic inequality), so most of it remained in dusty boxes forever. While everybody who took decisions preferred to rely on copying proven things capitalist countries already started to make. Up until the moment when ever increasing lag made it impossible even to re-create something even having full set of freshly stolen docs.

As for nice things - it seems to be somewhat poorly defined expression. You could have sex in USSR, or go to a forest to pick some mushrooms, and that were nice things I guess? But situation with consumer products, including food was abysmal compared to even worst examples of capitalist world.

Sure, when you're threatened by a state that has used nukes against a rather large population, as opposed to the 'testing' in the Pacific or Siberia, and apparently is run by insane genocidaires, you're going to become very, very paranoid and expect espionage everywhere.

Of course they copied what they could. Like we all do. Information is addictive and wants to be free. But the USSR had a very skewed view of life on the other side of the 'curtain'. It was also not as propped up by colonialist endeavours as the US, and if you'd have pulled that value out of the US economy the USSR might have 'won' the Cold War.

Yeah, there were rather neat suburbs and relatively well stocked shops in the US, but was it worth the genocide in Guatemala? The undermining of democracy in Europe? The return of heroin as a widely available drug of abuse?

Same goes for the UK, was the wealth on those islands worth the long line of southeast asian famines? The terror and exploitation in Kenya?

I'm no friend of soviet or chinese attempts at reaching communism, but the claim that they haven't achieved any nice things because they weren't capitalist is blatantly untrue. From this follows the conclusion that we likely could move on from capitalism and possibly achieve a global society that isn't centered around economic transactions, conflict, exploitation and surveillance. Some would say it's necessary due to the damage to our habitat industrialisation has caused.