The enonomy was centrally planned
That's the difference between state capitalism and the regular one. In the regular capitalism, the means of production are controlled by the capital holders, by the rich few. In state capitalism the means of production are controlled by the state, but the rest stays the same, people work for money, the results of their labour gets sold on a market of some sorts, and the surplus value is gathered by the stakeholders. Corporations in state capitalism consist of natural monopolies/oligopolies, which makes the market non-free by default, which makes everything else kinda fall apart, but it doesn't make it not capitalism, it makes it end-stage capitalism from the beginning. For the vast majority of the USSR existence that was the case.
the urge to conclude this comes
from the desire to use words by their meaning. I am not talking about why USSR was what it was, I am only talking about what it was. It wasn't socialism, because the main characteristic of socialism is that the means of production are collectively owned by the workers, and the means of productions in USSR were owned and operated exclusively by the state which consisted on unelected elites. It wasn't communism, the main characteristic of that is that it's moneyless classless society that distributes the goods based on needs, and in USSR there were social classes, there was an exchange of goods and services for money, and although there was no privately owned means of production, the amount of goods a person could receive was dependent on how much work they contribute, not on how much they need.
Economically, the USSR was a form of state capitalism, and politically it was a totalitarian dictatorship. And no matter how much they said that the ultimate goal of a country is to transition to a communism (and believe me I know how much they did it, I had to endure it in school), I don't see any moment at which it really happened.
We could argue a lot about who declared whom an enemy, what were economical implications of the most brutal war in history, and what was the reason for the inhumane treatment of the soviet citizens by their own rulers, and is it really evil to starve to death millions of people if it means that the steel production will be a bit better, and based on your comment I assume you have a lot of strong opinions about that. But ultimately that will not be a debate about the economical structure.