Ok, the only time the Soviet Union had a functional economy was from around 1925-28 when they had NEP, or New Economic Program, which was capitalism. Stalin said revolutions can never stand still, they move forward, or fall back. He then started the forced mass collectivization. The whole system was rotten, and could never work, because their theory of human nature was based on delusions.
Hate to admit it, but Stalin was right there [in very general terms] - NEP was the slow road to nowhere in particular.
And it
did work - in the respect it took a agricultural semi-colonial economy and built it into an industrial one [whether it could have been done much cheaper is a different question]. What it failed at was the 'next phase' where
intensive not
extensive growth was vital.
Yes, but the problem was that there was no one left in charge who understood basic economy on instinctive level, so they were easy victims for snake salesmen and other conmen disguising themselves as economists. If Gorbachev had focused on a bottom up reform of the economy with slowly stopping the price control on different basic goods, allowing private enterprise and reformed the agricultural sector, he would have been inba much better position for the later bigger reforms.
Actually, there
were. Much of the problems mainly came from the politicians and apparatchiks. For example, Gosplan economists were
not allowed to know the the 'real' budget, the size of the miliary sector and so on [which meant they were unable to know how much resources they had to play with]. Economics as a discipline was long crippled by the fact it 'intruded' too closely onto Marxist ideology, and the realms of statistics... well, they were usually treated as state secrets. Lastly, we need to remember that Gosplan was creating policies for the entire country, almost
devoid of computer processor power and limited information.
One of the few things Stalin did well for the economic health of the USSR in his final years was the wholesale 'reset' of prices and wages in [I think] 1947. Most [though not all] the subsidies for products were stripped out which allowed the 'official' and 'market' prices to rapidly converge, while tighter wage-ceilings were enforced. Much of the problems of the later USSR was the fact that the politicians were simply too generous with pay rises but rarely if ever rose prices or provided enough extra products to soak up the excess demand they were creating.
...Almost none of the changes proposed here will happen: in a system where there is no incentive to get better....there is no getting better. You’ll always have the rare combination of idealistic types who are sharply intelligent that will occasionally show up and better society but they are few and far between.
Outside of what I just mentioned, there is nothing proposed here that will make the USSR into a prosperous economy. Everything else runs into a resource traps or is bandaid on a broken system. Even a total disarmament and using all that wasted wealth on improving the country will only delay the collapse of the System.
Which was the fundamental flaw for a centralised command economy - there was little incentive to introduce new things. It ran basically on the 'rachet principle'; aka more of the same, utilising current designs and so on. This was in fact a flaw that everyone knew about, but the political 'cost' of sorting it out was simply too high.
Now, disregarding actual 'capitalist' solutions as non-starters, the only path I can see working from say 1955 onwards is a technocratic, decentralised system - where Gosplan [with better figures] takes a much more 'broad brush' approach to the Plan, with much of the decision-making power devolved down to individual companies, plants and farms. The metrics of 'success' are shifted from mere output to actual profit ratios, and the prices being charged are much more in keeping with actual consumer demand.
The resource trap of the 1970s is a harder one to avoid...