This is exactly the reason the USSR fell. Sure, a lot of morally reprehensible actions were performed on innocent citizens, but that's not what actually ended it. The US et al. fought the USSR by destroying their crops and imposing high tariffs. The USSR couldn't produce everything it needed and so suffered because it still had to defer to the capitalist nations for the rest (who were, measured using the capitalist GDP metric, accelerating far in front of the USSR). The "communism" employed by the leaders of the USSR wasn't as profit-hungry as other strategies and so the federation suffered.