That's an interesting insight

Matthew Yglesias » Public Transit in Russia

Russia ranked the highest on the Greendex scale, with 52 percent of respondents reporting daily or near-daily use of transit. [...]

I wasn’t surprised by this, Russia has excellent public transportation and a highly urbanized population. The Moscow Metro is absolutely lovely, and the Nizhny Novgorod Metro is pretty good, too, and at least when I was there Nizhny also had a good system of streetcars and trolleybuses.

And when you think about it, none of this should be that surprising. Without real market prices, the Soviet Union was horrible at producing mass market consumer goods. But when it comes to things for which there is no real free market, Soviet production was fine. Soviet nuclear missiles, fighter planes, etc. were just fine. That’s why the USSR wound up falling apart over popular discontent rather than an inability to militarily deter the west. Cars, of course, are a consumer good. But there’s no free market in subway systems. So the Soviet Union had crappy cars but great subways, which led to transit-oriented lifestyles, and that legacy continues today.

I'm less interested in the public transportation aspect than the insight that non-market-sensitive products (I'm sure that economics has a word for them) are less affected by a centralized planning system such as in a communist state.  That really makes perfect sense, but I'd never thought of it that way.