Communism failed in Russia for the same reason it failed everywhere else:
*You cannot replace the millions of free thinking individuals that make up the free market with a bureaucracy.*
Wages, prices, incentives. Everything falls apart as more and more arbitrary value is applied to goods and services.
The gulags, the pogroms, “human nature”, corruption, Stalins leadership, the conflict with the west, *everything* is secondary to the single, true cause of soviet downfall: Communism itself does not work. In theory, or in reality. It is a catastrophically flawed idea to begin with.
