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The state of post-Soviet Russia is entirely a result of the transformation of apparatchiks into kleptocrats. There's no ideology there beyond fucking-over the serfs, so they have gone back to pre-Soviet conditions but with the additional leverage provided by 21st Century technology.

The disastrous Soviet experiment was not only a bad thing in and of itself (remember kids, Stalin murdered more of his citizens than did Nazi Germany, possibly 10 times as many in absolute numbers), but also wasted a whole century when Russia should have been progressing in parallel with the USA, but with the added benefit of actually having some culture.

I don't really want to get into the who killed how many argument, as Stalin had much longer to get on with it (1926 - 1953, as opposed to 1933 - 1945, or 41-45 if we are simply talking about the number of Soviet citizens killed by Hitler), and although there were many, many executions under Stalin (eg the Katyn massacre), and there is also no doubt that the gulag system was inhuman, the Hitler regime was qualitatively different in that the only outcome foreseen for the *Vernichtungslager *and certain *Arbeitslager *was death, whereas even the German POWs held after the end of the war had a notional release date, even if a lot of them did not live to see it (anything from 1950 - 1955, trivia fans).

Did the communists do a better job of managing the economy than the Tsarists (or some other bourgeois version) would have? An open question, but to say that a century was wasted is wrong. Huge progress (at a terrible cost) was made under the Soviets - to pretend otherwise is just not right.