Ings is referring to 'geographic determinism,' the theory that the environment determines the cultural development of a region.

This line of reasoning has a long tradition, but has been fairly criticized as upholding racist pseudoscience and colonialism. The recent renaissance of this tradition is somewhat curious given the early refutations even as the discipline of geography was crystallizing. In this case, the argument goes that Russia lacked the environment necessary to compete with the industrializing West, and was 'fairly' left behind (unsurprisingly, determinism is very linked, in the late 19th century, to social Darwinism).

This argument is central to the thesis of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, and you'll probably find much more thorough critical analyses of Diamond's work than Ings'. But even though it doesn't have much contemporary support by historians and geographers, it was an important concept of the early Soviet Union. The 19th century historian Sergei Solovyov wrote the "History of Russia" that maintains a very similar argument, and several conservative scholars of the 18th and 19th century uphold environmental influence on government, defending the authoritarian monarchy based on Russia's climate. Perhaps most explicitly, Trotsky, in his history of the revolution, states:

The primary, most stable feature [of] Russia is the slow nature of its development - hence the ensuing economic backwardness (экономической отсталостью), primitiveness of social forms, low level of culture. The population of the gigantic and harsh plain, exposed to the easterly winds and Nomadic natives, was by nature doomed to a lengthy delay. [source] (http://kataklizmi.narod.ru/na4om/best328.htm)

This deterministic view was quite popular in geography, but for an example of early criticism Carl Sauer, in "The Morphology of Landscape," writes

"The content of landscape is found therefore in the physical qualities of area that are significant to man and in the forms of his use of the area, in facts of physical background and facts of human culture" (303)

"Is it perhaps too broad a generalization to say that geography dissociates itself from geology at the point of the introduction of man into the areal scene? Under this view the prior events belong strictly in the field of geology and their historical treatment in geography is only a descriptive device employed where necessary to make clear the relationship of physical forms that are significant in the habitat." (307) source

And more generally, Ings presents some fascinating stories and connects them well, but do note that Stalin and the Scientists is popular history. Like Guns, Germs, and Steel, it is not as rigorous as specialist works (for Russian science, Joravsky and Graham are the primary English scholars). I would caution any sort of grand narrative about the scientific system of the early Soviet Union; Alexei Kojevnikov and Nikolai Krementsov have a variety of works examining the functional aspects of the system (and they draw different conclusions). For a paper very closely looking at Marxist theories of determinism, see Bassin, Mark. "Geographical Determinism in Fin-de-siecle Marxism: Georgii Plekhanov and the Environmental Basis of Russian History." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82, no. 1 (1992): 3-22.

In addition to u/Dicranurus's excellent answer, the idea of 'capitalism' as a distinctive economic system has been overturned by economic histography since WWII (outside some specific contexts such as in contrast to socialism). The current picture is that economies have been using features typically associated with capitalism (private property, profit-seeking, money, wage labour) back at least 4000 years). Understanding differences in economic outcomes is now much more multi-factorial and scalar, what matters is not so much the type but the degree. Therefore the concept of a country adopting 'capitalism' or not doesn't really make sense.

I wrote more about this in this earlier comment.