we were wrong about certain aspects

I think the wrongness of popular perception tends to go in the other direction. People often misunderstand just how badly the Soviet bloc lagged in high technology, precision manufacturing at scale, etc. This makes sense because they remember and have read about the military parity, the brief period of (very roughly) comparable middle class standard of living, etc. But Moore's law (among other things) dramatically exacerbated the technology gap - you can have, say, a steel or oil industry that's a couple of decades behind the state of the art. An IC industry that far behind is barely a meaningful IC industry at all.