With all their rhetoric on substantive equality, & the time, state ownership, & central planning to achieve it, we’d expect at least the main outcome of economic equality. Yet, measures of economic inequality don’t support that: China, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba rate medium on economic inequality. (Only, North Korea with an average height notably shorter than South Korea due to food shortages has low economic inequality.) To the contrary, the “flawed” liberal democracies in Europe, Canada, East Asia, Australia do better with low economic inequality.

Despite an ideology opposing the exploitation of workers, Soviet forced labor camps did exactly that & would work the malnourished to death.

The formal guarantees for nutrition from those benefits meant little when at least 5 million died during the Soviet famine of 1932 the Soviets created.

For instance, over five million people lacked adequate nutrition and starved to death during the Soviet famine of 1932–1933, one of several Soviet famines. The 1932–33 famine was caused primarily by Soviet-mandated collectivization, although the famine in part was also caused by natural conditions. In response to frequent shortages, massive second economy existed for all categories of goods and services.

In contrast, during the Great Depression in the United States, mortality fell & there were few reported cases from starvation.

Without profit motive in those “benefits”, we might have expected a better environmental record in the Soviet Union. To the contrary

Total emissions in the USSR in 1988 were about 79% of the US total. Considering that the Soviet GNP was only some 54% of that of the USA, this means that the Soviet Union generated 1.5 times more pollution than the USA per unit of GNP.

Their planners considered pollution control

unnecessary hindrance to economic development and industrialization

and

By the 1990s, 40% of Russia’s territory began demonstrating symptoms of significant ecological stress, largely due to a diverse number of environmental issues, including deforestation, energy irresponsibility, pollution, and nuclear waste.

Stemming from those so-called benefits, the Soviet constitution of 1977 made a number of promises it couldn’t realize.

• labor, free from exploitation, as the source of growth
• continuous improvement of their living standards (art. 39)
• steady growth of the productive forces (art. 40).

The Soviet experience of socialist ownership and the concomitant centrally planned character of the economy showed the difficulties of realizing economic growth in order to ensure an increasing standard of living. Growth in the Soviet Union had been high in the nineteen thirties and early fifties, but had been deteriorating ever since.

The actual functioning of the centrally planned economy was very different from the way it was planned to function. This had very much to do with the fact that economic actors in the Soviet Union also responded to state actions in a way that frustrated the state’s stated intentions. People engaged in informal and illegal activities and reduced their working time, frustrating the growth targets.

Shortages increasingly lead people to the second economy with its blat (favors) network. Eventually, the last Soviet leaders, conceding failure by their own standards (economic, social, & cultural rights) & western standards (civil & political rights), dismantled the system from within: Western governments had exceeded their communist state by all standards.

The end of the Cold War has changed the focus of the debate on human rights. The West, with its focus on civil and political rights, no longer opposed the Soviet states, with their emphasis on economic, social and cultural rights. The demise of the communist systems gave rise to a certain extent of triumphalism in the West, which had proven to be not only superior in political and civil rights, but also in economic and social rights. The economies of the western countries produced much more income and the material welfare of their populations was much higher than that of those living in Eastern Europe.