Would even that have helped?
China benefits from a massive population of unskilled laborers. The Soviet Union's population, even at its height, was much smaller, and the fact of the matter is that if there's any Cold War going on, they'll be devoting a proportionally larger fraction of their output to the Red Army than the PLA gets from China.
Without a big army to go around supporting red countries there would be no Cold War.
The Soviet population was also relatively skilled and still very large (larger than the United States', which of course dominated manufacturing into the 1980s), while the standards of living meant that they were cheaper than Western workers. Regardless of the political factors that would have inhibited China-esque reforms, they very well could have competed as a lower-cost alternative to Western manufacturers, with the benefit of being more on-par with Western workforces.
That is the main advantage... That and that, believe it or not, Eastern bloc products were known for being sturdy and durable.
The problem is that Soviet industrial workers were closer to factory-floor serfs than anything else, heavily reliant on blat (Russian industrial workers still are, too), producing garbage by and large and essentially there was no labor market.
I don't think you can just square that circle, honestly. By the time the Chinese got kicked out of the countryside and put into factories, industry conformed to the market.
This is supposing that production patterns too, are altered.
Command economies, rather, are very good at copying what has already been done to a low standard without regard to cost. If you try to do that without the immense resources available to the Soviets, it would fail and badly.
They are not a 'good way to industrialize' unless the dramatic expansion of heavy manufacturing output is literally your only goal, with no regard to human life or over all benefit, and you have access to a gigantic reserve of some valuable resource (or resources).
This is bullshit. Do not follow this path. You are departing from the vast, overwhelming majority of analysis from across the political spectrum and no, you are not 'smarter' than all those foolish economists who refuse to see the holy glory and light of command socialism. You can find people who are in favor of dramatic government involvement in the economy, of a generous welfare state, and an important role for encompassing regulation who will still call you a damned fool for championing the ability of Soviet-style command economics to get results on anything without immense human and natural cost.
EDIT: It astounds me that, today, we can still have fellow travelers apologizing for the Soviet Union. It is people like this who give socialism a bad name and set the movement in the West back years or decades in terms of public acceptance.
Belarus still has a command economy and it's been faring nicely. The only difference is that they now allow some form of private control in the consumer market, where planning stuff is too much of a hassle and can't be done easily.
Perhaps the Soviets can just follow the South Korean model of going up the learning curve and keeping your market closed to imports until you are ready for the outside world?
That'd backfire. South Korea had nothing to lose. The USSR would need to keep up their model until their economy wasn't just ready, but effectively on overdrive so that when you opened up, you'd already have a working economy in place, rather than have to race against others.
Honestly calling it a command or planned economy gives too much credence to how planned it actually was, it was more like super-patrimonialism.
It went from planned economy, to half assed planned economy to, "we're too lazy, so just pay people for sitting in assembly lines doing nothing or sleeping in the office's rest area".
Given AK 47's and Soviet Tank designs, I don't think the command economy was bad, but it was meant to industrialize the country, not run it!
