What caused the shortages of goods in the later days of the Soviet Union?

Question

What caused the shortages of goods in the later days of the Soviet Union?

In: Economics

Answer 1

Simple: They completely ignored economics 101, i.e., the law of supply and demand. As others have pointed out they also suffered from being an underdeveloped country at the turn of the 20th century. But trying to control the production (i.e. supply) via a massive bureaucracy was the wrong way to try to fix that. There was a popular joke in the USSR: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”.

Another commenter here blamed it on theft or equivalently black markets and corruption. Those things flourished but they are the ***result***, rather than the ***cause***, of a failed economy.