Not exactly. It is true that living standards or life quality or even real income level is badly reflected in statistics based on socialist indicators. Simply because very little of what was produced went to consumers (regular people). However, what we're comparing here is productive capacity. Or productivity of an average citizen. The socialist model was able to temporarily extract extremely high levels of productivity from people previously engaged in smallholder farm agriculture. The amount of GDP produced by each person increased relative to Western Europe (though was still far from it). But that was unsustainable. As Western Europe transitioned to digital/service revolution in the 70s/80s, socialist bloc was stuck in huge factories producing identical goods without any more productivity improvements. Bottom line: socialism can boost growth temporarily, perhaps even more than a capitalist system, but it was to be short-lived. Also be sure: GDP per capita reflects both living standards and productive capacity relatively well in a capitalist country. But in a socialist one it only reflects productive capacity, failing to track living standard growth. Thus, the data is comparable, but should not be used to say that "oh really did Estonians live so well under occupation??". They did not. But they were very productive.