What caused the shortages of goods in the later days of the Soviet Union?
In: Economics
One really important note about the Soviet Union is that they made a policy decision early on to match the West in terms of military power. They did this because they had already been invaded by the West after WW1, and they were again invaded by Nazi Germany during WW2. Unfortunately for the Soviets, Russia was a backwater and had no where near the industrial capacity of the western powers, and so they essentially neglected their consumer goods industry. This is why they had no problems mass producing tanks and AK 47’s, but you had to wait for basic goods like toilet paper.
The other important thing is that they were, like others have said, a command economy. Command economies operate everything from the top down of the State, rather than through a “free market”. This leads to lots of inefficiencies due to mistakes in the planning process, and not a great way to rapidly adapt to those shortages and mistakes. It’s worth noting that the Soviets did most of these calculations by hand without the assistance of computers, which essentially created an entire class of professional bureaucrats that just created more issues down the line (black markets, theft, etc). In modern day, lots of businesses (such as Walmart, Amazon, etc) actually use centralized economic planning techniques at the same scale the Soviets did, but they have the benefit of modern technology that makes it much more manageable.
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