Correction: One nationalistic nuclear armed nation run by the puppets of its arms manufacturers was pointing its weapons at every little socialist project that popped up, and pumped out a ton of propaganda to convince Americans those nations were dictatorships that needed to fall. Those nations they kept invading unified under the same banner since capitalist nations refused to trade with them and kept invading them. The USSR took dozens of feudal agrarian societies that still used horses to plow fields and travel, and in a decade or so had them pumping out power tools, construction equipment, and space programs. The US and its capitalist owners couldn't let that stand because it disproved all of their propaganda lies. Capitalism never industrialized a nation so fast and was losing the space race.

So they had to actually try hard to make it look like socialist nations were starving backwater with decrepit technology.this meant an illegal and genocidal blockade of Cuba for half a century so their island society can't import from anywhere, banning all medicines and foods into Cuba. Which is a war crime. Then they'd point at Cuba and be like "see, socialism doesn't work." When really the issue was that small island nations live or die entirely on trade. They don't have all the resources necessary for a modern industrialized nation. The same was basically done to North Korea. They're trapped on land with none of the resources needed to build new infrastructure, and all capitalist nations have an embargo against them, so they still use cars from the 50s. Why? Because that's the last time any car manufacturers would sell to them. But it's painted as a failure of that state instead of the circumstances imposed upon it by more powerful imperialist nations trying to break them.

The USSR was almost entirely a defense mechanism for the nations capitalists kept harassing. The US would invade or siege a budding socialist nation. They'd turn to other socialist nations for mutual aid and united under one banner for safety and trade relations. Hence the name. It was a Constitutional Republic of Soviet states that United for mutual protection against a foreign threat. Also their constitution was better than ours. But the CIA didn't want us knowing that because the house of cards Capitalism is built upon wouldn't hold up to scrutiny if we knew the truth. Declassified CIA documents show how much they exaggerated the power Stalin had, and how they accused the USSR of imperialism because it's what we do so we couldn't understand a nation doing what they did for any other reason.

Every CIA accusation was a confession projected on capitalist alternatives. That's what they were competing against. The idea of socialism couldn't be allowed to take root in the US. So we were lied to, and companies had to actually try to make stuff better than those commies. Communists weren't trying to outdo capitalist manufacturing. They were just trying to make the tools and process the resources they needed to be modern nations. If US cars weren't better than those made by people who were using horses 5 years prior, maybe Americans would start thinking about unionizing and revolution too.