"In fact, the primary problem in the Soviet Union was socialism."

"One of the common denominators between Leninists and government interventionists in the West is the belief that the problems of monopoly are the problems of ownership: only private monopolies acting out of greed are harmful. These institutions are suppressing scientific and technical progress, polluting the environment, and engaging in other conspiracies against public well-being.
    "Government monopolies, however, were believed to be ethical and upright; they substituted the 'greed' of the profit motive with a 'societal interest.' Yet group bureaucrats who manage and operate the public sector are no less self-interested than those who manage and operate private business. One important difference exists, though: unlike private entrepreneurs, they are not financially responsible for their actions and they operate without institutional constraints of cost control that private property and competition induces. The enlightened minds of planners and technocrats cannot overcome the problem of economic calculation without market signals.
    "'The failure of socialism in Russia, and the enormous suffering and hardship of people in all socialist countries, is a powerful warning against socialism, statism, and interventionism in the West. 'We should all be thankful to the Soviets,' says Paul Craig Roberts, 'because they have proved conclusively that socialism doesn't work. No one can say they didn't have enough power or enough bureaucracy or enough planners or they didn't go far enough.'...
    "A common mistake Western observers made was to think the Soviet Union's fundamental problem was a lack of democracy. They completely overlooked that the institutional structure of the political system cannot overcome the problem inherent in an economic system with no means of rational calculation. The Soviet Union had a number of leaders who promised political reform, but none was able to put bread on the table. In fact, the primary problem in the Soviet Union was socialism."

~ Yuri N. Maltsev from his article 'The Decline and Fall of Gorbachev and the Soviet State.' Maltsev is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute, who worked as an economist on Mikhail Gorbachev's economic reform team before emigrating to the United States in 1989. The article is based on his introduction to the 1992 book Requiem for Marx