Maybe not a technological problem, but they certainly had a data problem. Most of the statistics the Gosplan (USSR economic planners) were basing production quotas on were fraudulent. It made price/cost discovery even more impossible.
Socialism didn’t work in _any_ country ever tried.
Even in East Germany, the country’s economists admitted in 1989 that the free market works far better and the centralized economy results in wrong allocations of resources and money.
Funny you say that, as the east/west Germany unification has been a disaster for the east side, and it still is today the poorer part of Germany. Before the unification, the east had a working economy, perhaps with problems, but every economy has problems.
> Socialism didn’t work in _any_ country ever tried.
Leninism didn't, but there's a reason why non-Leninist Marxists have been calling Leninism state capitalism since well before it's failure was obvious.
Socialism, specifically a form of what Marx referred to as “bourgeois socialism”—though not so much by conscious design but as a compromise between Marxist and other proletarian socialists who were instrumental in labor, abolition, suffrage, and other social justice movements and more moderate forces within and outside of those movements—was completely successful in the environment (advanced democratic capitalist states) for which Marx prescribed his form of socialism, being so successful as to entirely displace the late-19th Century system for which Marx coined the term “capitalism” with a system in which the rent seeking power of capital was significantly more constrained in favor of broad (varying from country to country) guarantees for the basic necessities of the general population, which has been referred to by a variety of names (the “modern mixed economy”), though it's so completely displaced the original system called “capitalism” in the same states where that systemmwas once dominant that it is now most frequently just called “capitalism” despite being very different from it.
