"Mate, I'm American. Get the fuck out of here with any Mexican praise." This is how you sound to anyone who sees through your thinly veiled racism and russophobia.

The soviet way was to have the elites be rich

Patently false propaganda. The Soviet Union was the most egalitarian that the region has ever seen.

They were doing pretty much what ICE is doing in the US right now - complain that your neighbour is a kulak, and they get removed

So you agree that people should be dying at 30 years of age in absolute poverty while working the lands for the landlords on exchange for a misery wage, dying of disease of starvation? Because that's what led to the mass popular support for dekulakization.

Plus the 5 year economic plans brought with them lovely things like the Holodomor.

The famine of the early 30s is a sad tragedy in Soviet history, but it's one of many famines that took place in the region from the time it was settled to begin with until the Soviets eliminated famines through industrial agriculture. While the first 5-year plans brought some misery such as the unforeseen sabotage of agriculture by kulaks, they also allowed the Soviet Union to industrialize at the quickest pace any country had industrialized up to that point, which is the main reason the Soviets were able to defeat the Nazis and save hundreds of millions of lives in the process.

China is going to have the most billionaires of any nation in probably less than a decade.

I have disagreements with some Chinese policy such as that, but the results are out there. If it weren't for communism, China would be a western colony, and would be on a similar standing to India, to which it can be very much compared at the beginning of the 1900s. Why is China so much more developed than India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia or Philippines? It's not a perfect country, but it's some of the best the world has to offer.

If you want an actual example of the success of communism, there’s always Cuba.

I fully agree, but why do you criticise dekulakization in the USSR and not the repressions against landlords in Cuba? Most Cubans were literal slaves under the landowners, and worked the lands for next to nothing. There was a measurable degree of repression against landlords, why aren't you crying your eyes out for them? Maybe just because you, as an Estonian, have been injected Russophobic racism in your life, in the same way that USians are injected anti-Mexican racism and Spaniards (like me) are injected anti-Moroccan racism? Why aren't you complaining about the lack of freedom of press in Cuba? Why aren't you complaining about the Cuban leaders having so much more than the Cuban people?

then there was a significantly delayed improvement during Mao's reign of terror, and when he was sidelined due to illness in the 1970ties and capitalist policies adopted, China finally caught up to its peer counties.

You're misreading the data. The biggest step in the graph is from 1965 to 1970, full Maoism, and from 1970 to 1975 it's still during Mao. I explicitly said at the beginning that life went from 35 to 60 and you said that's false, you literally didn't know the data, and now you're moving the goalposts from "Maoism didn't increase life expectancy" to "maybe it did but less so than in South Korea".

As for why China developed slower than South Korea, South Korea is an American military base with a population of just a few tens of millions. It received humongous investments and tech transfer from the US as part of a specific policy. If you want to compare to something more akin to China, you could compare China to Indonesia or Philippines, which didn't receive the same amount of American resources. What does life expectancy and poverty reduction tell you there?

Mao delayed the improvements seen during that time all over the world

All over the world? South Korea is the exception. Look at life expectancy evolution in India, Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh or Pakistan, all countries with a much greater population than South Korea. China industrialised because of communism, there's a reason why it's more developed than any of the aforementioned countries even if it had a very similar starting point in the early 1900s.

Also, you really think that telling me "Dengism in China uplifted 800mn people from poverty" is an argument against communism? The communist party of China literally envisioned the policies necessary to attract the level of western investment to grow so fast, and managed to direct this investment in a way that would industrialise the country and not just exploit it as the west does in South America and Southeast Asia. It's the best example in history of poverty alleviation through conscious state policy. Dengism in China is not "capitalism", it's socialism with Chinese characteristics, and it's what allowed China to become arguably the most powerful country in the 21st century in a way that Europe and the US can't even begin to understand. I take it you're a supporter of the modern Communist Party of China, which enabled all of this?

Also: what a fucking anarchist, mate, defending the literally fascist dictatorship of South Korea up to 1990 as the growth model of a country. You're dirtying the name of anarchists, and I say it as a Marxist Leninist