How can people say communism never works when Stalinist industrialization led to the second most dramatic economic growth ever recorded (barley behind the Meiji restoration)?
Before the five-year-plans, Russia was a medieval country. In just a few decades, literally hundreds of millions of people learned to read, got access to healthcare for the first time, managed to purchase things like radios, books, magazines.
Millions of people saw dramatic upwards mobility unheard of in the West at the time. Most of the best scientists and engineers of the '30s and '40s were born in piss-poor farming families and through merit and hard work, managed to become part of the upper-class intelligentsia. Even many Soviet officials had humble backgrounds, like Kalinin who was a farmer.
Obviously WW2 could never have been won without the five-year-plans.
Economically and socially, Russia was very similar to India in 1914 in terms of literacy, access to healthcare, and basic living standards.
Compare Russia and India today and you'll see that it's actually capitalism which doesn't work, not socialism. Even though Russia isn't socialist anymore most of its infastructure and institutions were created in the Stalin era.