Brilliant insight buried deep within the comments on the Sydney Morning Herald

[Spitfire of ATJ]

42. It was also the hypocracy and the laughability of the language.

You and your boss called each other "comrade" as if the two of you were equals. As if your boss lived the same life you did. Everyone KNEW there was a privileged class despite the denials. Also the "plans" they offered that never came through. Like the five year plan to make sure everyone had a refrigerator. It wasn't a distribution problem, it was a supply problem because they had to produce everything internally. While it's true they put way too much effort into their military you have to remember they justified it by the fact that they had been invaded in the past and people like Patton fed into the notion that we wanted to invade them. What's funny is the leaders actually believed they could keep their population in the dark about how the rest of the world was advancing as they stayed stagnant. The space race was an attempt to prove they were more advanced and losing it was a major blow.