I struggled briefly with how to phrase that line you quoted and decided to I'd be coarse. I think there's truth to the claim that the Soviets went literally from like two generations or so from serfdom to the moon. I'd actually like some book recommendations about how the Soviets modernized so quickly And I'm not full on Maoist or anything. Again I like consumer goods. I just went from maybe ambivalent or moderate economically to further left.
Coarse or fine, though, it's still wrong. The parts of Russia that were backwaters were backwaters under the Soviet Union. The cosmopolitan centers were cosmopolitan. Meanwhile the principle effect of communism under Mao was the dispersion of urban specialization into rural generalization. As far as "progress", wheat production under Soviet communism went from one of the worlds top exporters to one of the worlds top importers but somewhere between 18 and 55 million people died in China from the Great Leap Forward (the fact that we don't know the number closer than that says a lot about the sophistication of the culture). The United States went from serfdom to the moon in two generations, too, and did so without inhibiting the social and economic progress of the nation. Not that "to the moon" is the best standard by which to judge a culture. I mean, Bhutan consistently ranks as one of the happiest nations in the world and only like 40% of Bhutanese even have access to the Internet. In any event, "socialism" and "communism" are often placed on a spectrum but there are reasons to dicker about that. I don't know of any books that talk about Soviet modernization because really, the Soviets effectively continued the confiscation begun under the Tsars. b_b recommended Richard Pipes to me and despite the guy being an old-school Reaganite hawk the book is balanced and compelling. If you want to see how the Soviet Union came apart, I recommend Hoffman's The Dead Hand.
The mythology is that Operation Paperclip gave us a leg up because we got Von Braun. The reality is the Nazis were ahead because they'd poured money into V-weapons and we hadn't. Freeman Dyson pointed out that the war might have had a very different ending if Hitler hadn't wasted more resources on Von Braun than the US spent on the Manhattan Project. But then, we spent twice as much on the B-29 as we did on the Manhattan Project so nothing is straightforward (as per usual). Fact of the matter is, we did spend $3B on developing a long-range strategic bomber fleet. This prompted Khrushchev to throw money at Korolev because Korolev promised Khruschchev ICBMs. Throwing money at Korolev gave the Soviets a leg up temporarily because the United States was too busy developing two parallel rocket programs (Von Braun at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama vs NACA), one running kerosene and the other running LOX. As soon as the Soviets embarrassed the United States, we merged it all into NASA and the Soviets proceeded to lose as big as a struggling command economy could be expected to while facing down the never-invaded winner of the world's largest geopolitical conflict. Matt Brzinski's Red Moon Rising is about exactly this.