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.