[summa_tech]

You know, I never thought about it that way. But you're making a lot of sense here. And in older sci-fi literature, after a very early period of distrust of the concept, cybernetics as a component / enabler of perfect collectivist society did show up, before - as you said - the West advanced too far away from the local state of the art.

Also, as a broader view of your point, perhaps technocratic communism degenerates by giving way to bureaucratic communism.

[gostsamo]

One thing to understand about communism is that lots of people believed in it, but for the most part the communist elites considered it a feudal system where one's access to resources made them valuable and gave them power. Anything that would provide the higher ups transparency and accountability would be ruinous for the balance of power and therefore met significant pushback. There was never a technocratic communism because idealists would be either defanged to act as specialist executor clas or outright removed as unreliable players.

Regarding computer usage, it was increasing to the very end, but the desolution of the USSR stopped it and the industry was destroyed in the following crises. The elites tried to modernize the economies, but it was too little too late.