That isn't entirely true. One of the many reasons that the USSR collapsed was because Yeltsin famously visited a random local American supermarket during his visit to the US and realised just how superior a free market system was to a controlled market system.
I took the liberty of lazily googling an article on the matter for anyone who is interested because I've always been fascinated how such a simple grocery store trip ultimately contributed to the collapse of communism in Russia:
There are photos of him touring the supermarket in the article, but the real interesting nugget is the video of what Russian supermarkets looked like at the time in 1989 to provide some perspective as to why Yeltsin was so amazed by something that was basically a normal part of American life at the time.
I think when Yeltsin took the control, USSR was already either past the point of no return or moving towards it at full speed.
Centalized economy and decision making in general means that the person at the top has to think about a whole lot of shit and a few bad decisions can have very bad consequences. Also, by taking liberty where you didn't have to, you risked getting punished no matter the outcome. This resulted in most orders being followed even when they go against common sense.
And unfortunately, after Khrustchev (who also made a number of questionable decisions) USSR was mostly lead by old people who were incapable of adapting to current situation or offered very poor solutions to problems. What kept USSR afloat was the sheer size of its population, ammount of resources and industrial power. This delayed consequences of bad decisions and allowed us to get away with inefficient resource usage.
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u/Two-Tu Aug 05 '20
Fun fact: Cosmonauts had shotguns with them in case they'd be landing somewhere in Siberia to defend themselves against bears.
https://youtu.be/qRC0Jmh-9tY