22.6: Conclusion- What Went Wrong with the USSR

In historical hindsight, the paradox of a "communist" country that so profoundly failed to realize its stated goals of freedom, equality, and justice, has led many people to speculate about what was inherently flawed with the Soviet system. There are many theories, three of which are considered below.

• The Soviet state was trapped in impossible circumstances. After World War I, the Bolsheviks inherited control of a backward, economically-underdeveloped nation. They utilized brutal methods in trying to catch up with the nations of the West. This thesis is supported by the success of the Red Army. If Stalin had not industrialized Russia and the Ukraine** by force, the results of World War II would have been even more awful.
• Communism is somehow contrary to human nature and thus doomed to failure, no matter what the circumstances or context. Scholars note the incredible prevalence of corruption at every level of Soviet society. A huge black market existed, as did nepotism and infighting from getting a job to obtaining an apartment in one of the major cities. Greed proved an implacable foe to communist social organization, with the party apparatchiks reaping the benefits of their positions - better food, better housing, vacations - that were never available to rank-and-file citizens.
• The Soviet economy was the ultimate expression of the idea of a “command economy,” with every product produced according to arcane and unrealistic quotas set by huge bureaucracies within the Soviet state. The most elementary laws of supply and demand were ignored in favor of irrational, and indeed arbitrary, systems of production. The results were chronic shortages of goods and services people actually needed (or wanted) and equally vast surpluses of useless, shoddy junk, from ill-fitting shoes to unreliable machinery. To cite a single example, party leaders in the Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan told farmers to buy up grain supplies from stores in order to meet their yearly quotas; those quotas were utterly impossible to meet through actual farming.

It should also be considered that there had never been anything like a democratic or liberal society in Russia. There was no tradition of what the British called the “loyal opposition” of political parties who may disagree on particulars but who are still accepted as legitimate expressions of the will and opinion of parts of the citizenry. There were no “checks and balances” to hold back corruption either. Indeed, by the Brezhnev era, political connections were far more important than any kind of heartfelt devotion to Marxist theory. Thus, the kinds of decisions made by the Soviet leadership were inspired by a pure, ruthless will to see results against a backdrop of staggering inefficiency and corruption.

Not everything about Soviet society was a failure. After the “Thaw”, almost no one was executed for simply disagreeing with the state, and prison terms were much shorter. Standards of living were mediocre, but medical care, housing, and food were either free or cheap because of state subsidies. The kind of “leveling-out” associated with communist theory did happen, in a sense, because most people lived at a similar standard of living, the perks allowed to senior members of the communist party notwithstanding. In the end, the Soviet Union represented one of the most profound, albeit often blood-soaked and inhumane, political experiments in world history.

** The use of "the" relates to the time before independence in 1991, when Ukraine was a republic of the Soviet Union known as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Today, the country is called and referred to as Ukraine, without "the".