If workers did not cooperate , because they thought it was against their self-interest ( for whatever reason ) , they were '' forced '' to do so , in peace-time as well as in war-time . Since workers resented this , producing things often became much less efficient , and output quality suffered . This caused endless management problems , and massive " policing " was required to ensure that things got done ( as documented by Western historians like R. W. Davies and Donald A. Filtzer ) . Despite never-ending reforms and policy changes , the cooperation problem was never truly solved . There was a lot of cynicism about that in Soviet society , even when life gradually got better and living standards improved . On 30 October 2007 , Russian President Vladimir Putin paid his respects to all the people killed under Stalin 's dictatorship in the days of the Great Terror . Putin stated : “ Hundreds of thousands , millions of people were killed and sent to camps , shot and tortured . These were people with their own ideas , which they were unafraid to speak out about . They were the cream of the nation . ” The theoretical conflict between Engels and Dühring about the role of value in socialism resurfaced in the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 1950s . Until the 1930s , the Russian communists had generally expected that the categories of value and the law of value would disappear under socialism . Given that Joseph Stalin declared in 1936 that , with full state control over the whole economy , socialism had been achieved , it was logical to think that commodity production and the law of value no longer existed either . However , from 1941 this idea was in dispute
Great Terror
Great Purge
Value-form