"In Russia, they thought everyone should have bread. That was a decision made by those in power, and they then tried to make that happen, whether everyone wanted bread or not. This did not work so well, and there were shortages."
So they produced bread, but then there were shortages? This doesn't make sense.
There is something that we could call "The Central-Planner's Dilemma".
People need shoes. Hence, there are people who will be looking to get into the business of supplying shoes. If you find a way to get shoes, and then sell them for more than it cost you, you can buy nice things and that impresses the ladies. You get entire firms dedicated to small problems like shoes for kids, business shoes, variations that suit people with wide feet. Market economies are like the mold on your bathroom ceiling - they just happen.
In Russia, the government went to great lengths to stifle that dynamic. They said: all people will need shoes, so the government will supply shoes to meet their need. Everyone will work together to give the government all the resources to do this. If you try divert resources from our project by getting into the shoe business, we'll shoot you.
So it's a new game. Now if you want to get the ladies, you need to become the resource allocation guy.
But let's assume that you are the planner, and that your motives are pure. You're a really good guy, and you do this for the sheer love of people having shoes. Here's the Dilemma: how do you convert the need of the people to the reality of the goods you're getting to them. This is crazy difficult.
To start with, how do you get signal about what the people need? This is hard. You could have a shot at it, by judging birth rates in regions, and getting height variation. You could send out teams to measure foot dimensions and then run statistical variance on sizes.
Then you'd needs to communicate that intent to the factories. And then the factories need to execute at producing the things that they should be producing. And then you need to somehow get the goods from the different factories through to the correct regions.
You're doing all this through a fog of politics, because jobs in resource-allocation are the only game in town, and everyone wants a piece of it.
The Alan Greenspan biography includes a neat section where he got to meet /the/ Russian central planner after the thaw. As in - the guy who sits in the room and decides how many shoes to produce. He describes a complicated mechanisms he set up to plan things. It's a good read.