It failed after Khrushchev ' s revisionism trashed their economy , and getting pulled into a costly arms raced with capitalist governments didn ' t help , since they are designed to suck as much labor out of people as possible . Of course a system originally meant to end exploitation is unable to win that race in the long run . After Stalin ' s land improvement program there was infrastructure to deal with the hostile climate Russian farmers face , and there hasn ' t been a famine since . Your information is faulty . Were they overzealous with the executions ? Probably a bit . But it was a brutal time , they could hardly trust anyone after the White Terror , where 100 , 000 jews were killed in pogroms and communists were burned and buried alive . Shit was seriously fucked up back then .