The USSR is way overused as an example of socialist failure. The negative examples of democratic socialism gone wrong are Britain's stagnation in the 60s/70s, and India's License-Quota-Permit Raj.
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Britain in the 60s and 70s wasn't that shitty of a place to live (despite what the Sex Pistols might tell you). But it definitely wasn't performing up to the standard set by France and Germany. Here's a graph from Novokmet, Piketty and Zucman (2018): 
And remember that dysfunctional systems can give rise to regimes that introduce other kinds of dysfunction as a "corrective". Without that 60s/70s stagnation, Britain wouldn't have gotten a Margaret Thatcher.
The lessons to be learned here are not obvious or simplistic ones (e.g. "socialism sucks, markets rule!"). It's just an illustration of how a dysfunctional system can have real consequences even in a well-run democracy. And how that can lead to further dysfunction as a backlash.
So instead of studying the USSR as an example of how things might go wrong in a Bernie/DSA-ruled America, we should probably study 60s/70s Britain.
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