&gt;&gt;The USSR said it was implementing communism (not socialism), but really implemented a brutal totalitarian dicatorship.<p>Its not really possible to be implement communism without dictatorship of some kind.<p>The moment you seize power, the very first thing you will realize is you need money to run your schemes. But there is only that much available, and that pool too is dwindling over time. Anybody good is taxed beyond their share, so they are always moving out to greener pastures, reducing your spending pool further. Pretty much everyone else thinks, its everybody else&#x27;s job to work and make for them. So no one&#x27;s contributing, but expecting the party to continue.<p>Its basically a giant negative feedback loop in a system that&#x27;s amplifying what&#x27;s coming in. And that is playing out at the scale of a country&#x27;s economy.<p>Now to control it all, you need to prevent people moving out(defectors), you need to continuously control what sort of information is fed to your masses, you need to control nearly everything there is to control because any deviation means people will stray away to create their own merit based islands. And if those islands get powerful, they can pull down  the regime.