>>653606All of this because the entire Soviet society, including the intelligentsia and bureaucrats, bought into the Kitchen debate and started comparing with the West despite the two systems being different and so also the outcomes and aims.
People started whining about the 10 years waiting time for a car, without considering that Soviet planners prioritized public over private transports (which makes more sense now with the whole climate thing). The USSR ended up with a world-class public transit system and being the first bus manufacturer in the world. Now we live in a society were not everyone can afford food but at least you can choose 40 different types of toothpaste and, as a lot of polls show, most of the people who experienced both systems have realized they were lied.
All the referendums on the conservation of the USSR in 1991 won by a huge margin so you can't even say that the end of socialism was due to the will of the people, but rather the lack of democracy. The ones who actually wanted naively thought that capitalism was some kind of golden thing, and Parenti even told that a lot of them thought that "the state would find a job" if they were to be unemployed under capitalism, despite it being a thing of socialism which was the only system they knew at the time. So traitors in the CPSU were allowed to seize the once public economy without the people doing anything because the cancer spread into the news and media apparatus.
All in all, the original sin was not creating a meritocratic political system that rewarded smart people, plus the inadeguacy of the democratic institutions, where there were any, which allowed the undemocratic dissolution of the USSR by vermin not loyal to the people and thus socialism. After the death of Stalin the Soviets stopped playing the long game and patiently do their own thing because most of the CPSU members were terminally retarded.