Both having a form of free market doesn't make it suddenly good for one side and bad for the other.

Some sort of free market is good, so new idea can brew, some of them being one day attempted, other won't because it ends up either not getting traction, or would very obviously fail after some research.

Problem is with too much planning is that it doesn't give as much place for innovation, as well as put too much weight on a single point of failure. That played a good part in the USSR famines, like the holodomor, which was then further aggravated by their unwillingness to admit they fucked up, blaming it on other factors. But if they had learned from their mistakes, it would have improved, but unfortunately those very same error were repeated multiple time (see the multiple famines the USSR faced while strangely their western counterparts did not).

And I'll pass on the other similar failures (Chernobyl, among other), that follow the very same pattern.

Of course, the USSR had some very clear wins, like the first part of the race to space, and others.

The USSR could have been a success if their leader weren't selfish idiots, which os a shame since I'd rather live in a good cummunism regime than a good capitalism regime.

I always worked toward such ideals, I contributed to some open-source project (Gnome, KDE, mostly translation, bug report, but also some packaging for OpenSUSE and Fedora.

I'm a bit tired of those who blindly follow ideologies without having the intellectual honesty to recognize where said ideology fucked up and where it was great. Do I have to be called a social-traitor for every reflection on communism or socialism? I doubt Marx would be happy to see those he tried to enlighten sheepishly follow whoever yell the loudest... Even if they yell parta of what he tried to teach them.