There's no way we have space here to do the whole debate, but for starters, the Soviet Union wasn't communist by any reasonable definition. Wikipedia does a quick breakdown:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism#Associated_usage_and...> While the term Communist state is used by Western historians, political scientists, and news media to refer to countries ruled by Communist parties, these states themselves did not describe themselves as communist or claim to have achieved communism: they referred to themselves as socialist states that are in the process of constructing communism
If we use genuine definitions of "communism" and leave to the side Red Scare American political non-definitions, we'd agree with the USSR when it doesn't call itself communist. We can happily disagree with them on their assertion that they were "in the process of constructing communism," the same we can disagree with the PRC's assertion that it's still doing the same today.
If you want to say something sucks, blame the Soviet-type economic planning model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet-type_economic_planning which featured absurd layers of bureaucracy that would result in, yes, the means of production being seized... and then misused by "intellectual party leaders" that thought they knew better than the people who, say, had been farming the land for hundreds of years, resulting in famine, or the other not-fun things about living in the USSR.
To your point, I can find absolutely no evidence that the USSR "seized" the game from Pajitnov. Do you have some? There was no intellectual property in the USSR, I'm not even sure what "seized" means in this context. Sure, he wasn't allowed to "sell" it in the Soviet Union, but it wouldn't really make sense in their economic system to "sell" the game. He was apparently nationally and internationally known for the creation, but it seems renown wasn't enough, he wanted commercial success as well, hence the emigration to the USA in the 90s.
I push back because listen to the story of how it was introduced, as interpreted by Wikipedia:
> Pajitnov had completed the first playable version of Tetris by June 6, 1984.[21] Pajitnov presented Tetris to his colleagues, who quickly became addicted to it.[15]: 87 It permeated the offices within the Academy of Sciences, and within a few weeks it reached every Moscow institute with a computer. A friend of Pajitnov, Vladimir Pokhilko, who requested the game for the Moscow Medical Institute, saw people stop working to play Tetris. Pokhilko eventually banned the game from the Medical Institute to restore productivity.
Does this remind you of MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory around the same era? How much of what we love to use today has similar origin stories, and brought their creators no commercial success at all? Gnu, the linux kernel, the core of most of our industry is built on libre software developed in this manner in that time. Why immediately jump to the assumption "no capitalistic success = bad?"
