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The notable problem with Communism is not that it made people generally poor. The problem is the vast amounts of rape, torture, hideous murder, rampant slavery, mass starvation, occasionally intentionally induced, and the general pattern of systemic efforts to mutilate the souls of those unfortunate enough to be held in its thrall. The fact that you have bypassed these to argue for common knowledge that Communism is bad because even elites weren't as rich as westerners rather underlines the point.
Communism is in fact a conflict theory. It is in fact predicated on making things good for Communists, and is explicit that this should come at the expense of non-communists, who are to be exterminated without mercy. It cannot even be argued that "non-communist" was a category one chose for themselves; communists routinely assigned the label on the basis of who your family was, and even on ethnicity when convinient.
I firmly believe that the left is evil, and am baffled that others are confused on this point. Certainly there has never been an empire more evil than Communism.
As others have noted, there were rape, torture, hideous murder, rampant slavery and starvation in many states across history, generally eased back on as such atrocities started to be less economically efficient and contributing to state security than not doing those things. So the notable thing about Communism is that they decided to do those things, up to eleven, and got nothing good in return. Elsewhere you say that those things would be immoral even if they resulted in great economic efficiency, and I agree, but I could find quite a few people even here on this forum who seem to be ready to return to premodern atrocity levels in return for some societal gains.
I think it's obvious the way Nazis determined their outgroup was quite a lot more rigid and, dare I say, final, than the way Communists did it. I'd guess there were more Communists of noble or otherwise undesirable descent than there were Jewish Nazis.
When there's no basis of injecting yourself into the power structure other than power, it doesn't look as bleak as having to be a blonde blue-eyed white man.
Also, I don't mean to say that Communism is a mistake theory, but that normies view "current society vs communism" as a mistake theory fight, as opposed to "current society vs nazism".
When you call an entire half of the political axis evil without even stating where you believe the center it, it does get confusing, yes.
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Of course this is the problem with communism. If all of the horrors of the USSR and red China had resulted in societies five times as prosperous as the US in material terms we’d all be communists now. The fact that the economic systems failed utterly is what makes communism disastrous. The torture, the killing, the brutality, (I exclude the starvation, which is a direct consequence of communism as an economic failure state), that is all sadly very human, very common, very widespread (certainly until very recently) in every corner of the world. What is particularly communist is that on not one occasion did it achieve anything like the mass popular prosperity achieved in comparable nations under capitalism.
I fundamentally disagree.
In the first place, if the USSR and Red China could actually produce five times the prosperity as the US, they likely would not have needed to resort to the violence. This is the basis of plausibility for "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism".
In the second place, I don't think torture, rape and murder can or will ever produce superior prosperity to their absence, so I don't think the question is actually meaningful. If we're going to chase the hypothetical, though, I'll happily reject the idea that economic abundance and moral justice are mutually fungible. It is not immoral to be poor. It is immoral to murder, rape and torture. This does not change even if the torture, rape and murder are enormously economically productive. Those who think otherwise and manage to make a go of it should be properly categorized as hostis humani generis. No mortal man is fit to prey on his fellows. Those who forget this should be reminded of their mortality.
I am skeptical that Communist Russia is actually typical in its rates of torture, murder and brutality. I think we can find other regimes that were similarly brutal, but those regimes are likewise unusual.
What is particularly communist is that it created notable brutality more or less out of whole cloth. We can accept that the Aztecs, in the end, gradually devolved into a society built on slavery and murder. What is surprising is that the Communists built such a society from scratch overnight, out of otherwise reasonably decent, peaceful human beings.
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