Metaphorical Inconsistencies as the Fall of Communism
They abolished money which created scarcity destroying the basis of a monetary society. This led to black markets for such things as food and wood. Even with a new model of "governance" in which everyone was supposed to be automatically equals no one followed such a system. Metaphors that have defined a society can't be altered overnight and that is what I think was the basis for the failure of the Soviet Union. There were no coherent set of metaphors which relate to what a communist state should be like. (While there were also no strict guidelines for a fascist system the system itself was an extreme right wing version of a capitalistic system with did not change the basic metaphors of how society was to behave. The change was added metaphors of ARYAN IS GOOD and JEW IS EVIL.)
When no fundamental set of ideology could be created for how a communist system should work the net effect is that communism died out as soon as its last survivors faded away that is 70 years after it started which as far as timelines go is pretty short. There was no fundamental shift as the primary metaphors of how one survives, "dog eat dog," does not correlate well to a communist system. That is why a system which was setup to abolish hierarchies in effect created its own hierarchy. In the end we take care of ourselves first and foremost and then others follow that is we innately put ourselves into a hierarchy. In such a system where pure equality does not have a metaphor associated with it, it is bound to fail.
I think that is why Stalin had his purges. An aspect of the purges was Stalin's paranoia, but a second likely aspect was trying to get rid of all the people who were able to construct alternative metaphors on how a society should function, i.e the Whites. Plus, I think that even if Trotsky came into power he would have done something similar as he himself was prone to using terror. In effect, the purges were a form of recreating society from the ground up removing all the undesirables. Unfortunately, in its short lived form I don't think that Communism ever came up with a set of ideas of what it stood for an in the end just became a authoritarian state.
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