If you’re looking for something easier I’d recommend Hakims videos

Think he has book recommendations in it for further reading but he goes over most of the major points well.

Im at work but very high level some of the issues are below. Apologies I may not be writing these out the best but will try to edit later.

1. Computational problem

Since this was before computer started to become widely used, central planning of a large economy like the USSR was difficult. This lead to some economic problems.

Nowadays that obviously wouldn’t be the case and this is covered well in the book “People’s republic of Walmart”.

2. Leadership Issues

The western idea of a dictatorship wasn’t accurate but the party did have some issues with leadership. Ossification (spelling might be wrong but too many old people in leadership) made it unable to pivot in some ways it could have. Also I believe it was Kruchev that allowed effectively any class to join the party (even bourgeois) led the party to become revisionist over the years.

As others mentioned they actually ended up reintroducing some market forces as a result of the reformists but not in smart/controlled way like China which led to other economic issues.

Will try to flesh this out more when I have a chance.

Aight so first of all, the Soviet Union was formally structured as a voluntary union of independent nations that were bound together by the Union treaty, under the leadership of a single political party, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Remember this for later.

Secondly, World War Two decimated the Soviet population and the ranks of the Communist party. This left the USSR with a labor shortage that it did not quickly recover from, as well as a Communist party full of cadres who may not have been the most qualified people.

This leads us to Nikita Khrushchev, who did several things that hurt the USSR both in his immediate tenure and in the long term. First, he gave his “secret speech,” in which he denounced Stalin, blaming him solely for the excesses of the great fear, the purges in the party, and the injustices that had occurred in that time. He also denounced Stalin for encouraging a so-called “cult of personality,” which led to a campaign of De-Stalinization, in which Stalin’s statues were torn down nationwide, Stalingrad was renamed, and Stalin’s body was removed from Lenin’s tomb, etc. The consequences were severe: the international prestige of the Soviet Union and communism were seriously damaged, with mass resignations from communist parties all over the world. The secret speech and De-Stalinization led to a blow in the self-confidence of the CPSU that it never recovered from.

Khrushchev then attempted to compete with the west in the realm of consumer goods, wanting to prove the superiority of socialism by using the Soviet planning apparatus to supercharge the mass-production of these goods. The trouble is that, at least as far as we know, state planning without a market distribution system is ineffective at creating the kind of consumer economy that western, capitalist countries enjoy (if such an economy is even desirable for a socialist society in the first place.) Under Stalin, most consumer goods had been manufactured by Artels (co-operative businesses) that had flexibility from state planning and relative independence. Khrushchev nationalized these cooperatives, which vastly increased the amount of inputs and outputs that state planners needed to keep track of, over-complicating the economic plans, eliminating flexible small and medium sized businesses and leaving only giant corporations, creating toxic incentives and various absurdities in the Soviet economy. As an example, in the 1980s, under Perestroika, a delegation from the optics industry in the west was invited to tour a Soviet optics factory. They were impressed by the level of optics technology that was being produced, which was comparable to anything in the west, but the factory manager complained that his ability to produce optics equipment was hampered by the factory needing to divert its resources to fulfill quotas for bicycles. Over time, this policy also led to an informal economy of unregulated market activity, as various enterprises and connected people used semi-legal or illegal ways to acquire and trade scarce consumer goods.

This all led to a liberal “Khrushchevite” tendency or faction to grow within the party and within the intellectual quarters of Soviet society- a tendency that measured Soviet success by comparing it to the west in every way. While Leonid Brezhnev was more successful successful in managing the economy, he failed to correct the fundamental distortions in the economy created by Khrushchev, or the faction in the party he created. Mikhail Gorbachev came from this tendency.

I’m tired and don’t want to write much anymore, so someone else pick up from here or I’ll come back to it later, but I’ll make a long story short: Gorbachev fucked everything up. He made all these problems worse by trying to fix them, surrendered unilaterally to the west in terms of the cold war, empowered a group of national leaders that were incentivized to demand more and more local powers to their countries, until those leaders broke the whole thing up.

socialism betrayed is a very good book. I’m not going to try to summarize it at all, but one point that the book makes was the growth of the grey/black market outside of the legal soviet economy. starting in the 60s (maybe the 50s? I don’t remember), the grey/black market really took off and was ultimately larger than the legal economy. Soviet leadership failed to address the needs served by the black market economy with the legal economy, creating a class of people who were incentivized to work outside of the legal economy and thus helped support material conditions for people who weren’t aligned with soviet leadership/the CCCP. this isn’t as glamorous as other potential factors (cold war, afghanistan, great man theory of soviet leadership) but when I read socialism betrayed this point stood out to me as highly significant.