Has nothing to do with Communism, and everything do with the rhetoric that follows this sort of approach towards governance, in which some idiot dictator uses Communist rhetoric to destroy the country by parceling out private corporations to his family and friends in the name of the people where he knows nothing about anything. The Soviet economy was perfectly functional until the very end. Chavez was a military dictator that knew shit all about running governments or about Communism or even Socialism.
> The Soviet economy was perfectly functional until the very end.
You have never spent much time in the former Soviet Union have you?
The Soviet Union could only survive because of its reliance on natural resources. They could not export exept to people they keeped under millitary controll and all of those tried to get western stuff if they could.
The Soviets themself always imported lots of tech from the west, with the exeption of select industries like space they were behind. Read:
- Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development 1917–1930 (1968)
- Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development 1930–1945 (1971)
- Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development 1945–1965 (1973)
Internally the Soviet economy never functioned as claimed. The only reason it could survive at all is because illegal market makers would travel around and exchange resources between different factories.
It is also a symptom of a capitalistic/plutocratic government. The fact that the rich control the media (CNN/MSNBC etc all owned by Clinton donors, [nytimes also corrupt](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-new-york-t...) and use their propaganda machine and [immense wealth](http://i.imgur.com/vUVatUt.png) to have their puppet elected... and then the biggest corruption machine in the world (creatively called "lobbying") gives your congress and senate bills to rubber-stamp... it's in a way worse than the Venezuela situation because at least Venezuela doesn't go out and kill thousands of (brown) people.
