I went to a very conservative high school, in a strongly Republican-dominated area of the US. When we studied the Post-WWII era in history, we were basically told that the Soviet Union lost the Cold War and fell because Communist economic policy destroyed all industry in the Soviet Union. My history teacher told us that Communist leaders forced people to leave their homes and travel hundreds of miles away, and told them what crops they had to grow regardless of whether the farmers had any experience growing those crops, or if the soil and environment were conducive to growing such crops. What we were told was, these decisions were all made by bureaucrats who had no knowledge or experience with farming, so they just picked crops out of a book and assigned them to plots of land. This was done because this is how a command economy works. Local entrepreneurs have no power to make decisions because a bureaucrat in the Kremlin makes all of the decisions regardless of whether or not it makes sense.
We were also told that the Soviet economy failed because nobody was financially rewarded for anything. That is to say, a person who refused to work was paid exactly the same amount as people who worked 16 hour days. So everybody realized that nobody needs to work to get paid, so everybody refused to work, and hence no crops were grown, no factories were run, etc. Everybody just kind of gave up, and the few people who worked only did so because the Soviet Army threatened to shoot anybody who didn't labor.
All of this sounds like some kind of bizarre caricature of Communism. I could go on and on, but you can probably imagine it all. We were told that America is exceptional due to our core values of capitalism and freedom, and that socialism is evil, etc. As an adult it seems rather unbelievable that the entirety of the Soviet Union's citizenry just "gave up" and eagerly awaited the government to give them "free stuff", or that the Soviet Army was literally rounding people up and threatening them at rifle-point to go to work every morning.
At the same time, everything I've read does indicate that the Soviet Union had extreme economic problems.
So, what's the truth? What really happened?
I want to comment on this particular issue:
Local entrepreneurs have no power to make decisions because a bureaucrat in the Kremlin makes all of the decisions regardless of whether or not it makes sense.
This is a very outdated and oversimplified way of understanding the way things worked in Communist regimes. The idea is that the Kremlin issues an order, and it's immediately implemented across the country with maximum ruthless effectiveness. There are no competing interests or motivations between institutions, social groups, or individuals. In fact, there can't be, because either you carry out the party line to the utmost or you resist, and if you resist, you're shot or thrown in the Gulag. This is the way Western scholars and historians tended to think about the Soviet Union in the early 1950s, when their access to Soviet sources was almost nonexistent and political tensions between East and West were at their highest, but as we gained more knowledge about how things actually operated in the USSR, it became clear that it wasn't this simple. Unfortunately, this oversimplified way of understanding how Communist regimes run has stuck around. One of the odd things about it is that it gives the Soviet government a bit too much credit -- they come off looking brutal, but absolutely capable of implementing their plans exactly as intended and completely on top of things. They were not. It's certainly true that there weren't local entrepreneurs the way we might understand them, but this doesn't mean that Soviet bureaucrats were all-powerful.
Hi u/Ethan-Wakefield. You might be interested in my answer to the question "How (in)efficient was the Soviet Union exactly?". https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rfhbr3/how_inefficient_was_the_soviet_union_exactly/
To put it simply all that sounds very, very, very loosely based on actual problems in the Soviet Economy but wildly exaggerates them to ridiculous lengths. The big thing to remember is that history is made up of people, and people rarely do things that make absolutely no sense. If you have any specific claims you want an answer to feel free to ask them to me.