"Wolverines!"

The historian Stephen Kotkin describes the USSR as an edifice "booby-trapped with idealism", and that seems about right. The great grey tyranny ran on, in some sense depended on, hopes big enough to counterbalance the country's defects. Khrushchev really meant the promises that were spelled out with such excruciating frankness in the programme. Dialectical materialism was to imply denial and self-sacrifice no longer. The philosophy was going to pay off in the most literal and direct way; it was going to do what it said on the tin, and bring the materialists their material reward.

It was going to make first Russians and then all their friends the richest people in the world. Naturally this would involve zooming past the United States. "Today you are richer than us," Khrushchev had told a bemused dinner-party in the White House. "But tomorrow we will be as rich as you. The day after? Even richer!" Now, in 1961, he laid it all out, hour after hour, to an auditorium stuffed with delegates from all over Moscow's half of the cold-war globe. Soon, he told the assembled Cubans and Egyptians and East Germans and Mongolians and Vietnamese, Soviet citizens would enjoy products "considerably higher in quality than the best productions of capitalism". Pause a moment, and consider the promise being made there. Not products that were adequate or sufficient or OK; not products a little bit better than capitalism's. Better than the best. Considerably better. Ladas quieter than any Rolls-Royce. Zhigulis so creamily powerful they put Porsche to shame. Volgas whose doors clunked shut with a heavy perfection that made Mercedes engineers munch their moustaches in envy.

So the confidence that allowed Khrushchev to quip and hector and shoe-bang his way across the world stage was founded partly on a truth about the present, partly on a profound mistake about the future. That the Soviet dream didn't work out, that in 1980 Soviet citizens were not going to be strolling in the pleasure-garden of red plenty, we all know. (Khrushchev's own colleagues worked it out very quickly. They ousted him from the Politburo in the autumn of 1964 and consigned the 1961 programme to unmentionable oblivion.) What we've forgotten is that anyone ever took such a thing seriously; that it was ever anyone's sober expectation (or giddy expectation) that the grim, spartan one in the superpower duo was planning to win at hedonism.

Given that it was an error, a mirage, an astonishing mass delusion, what do we gain if we do remember it? Well, for a start, irony enough to glut even the greediest palate. Alongside our well-documented, well-founded knowledge that Soviet history was a tragedy ought to run a sense of it, too, as a comedy; a comedy of ideas and of things; a comedy in which material objects spin out of control, like the production line running awry in Chaplin's Modern Times, and refuse more and more catastrophically to play the roles assigned to them by bossy human intentions. Think of Laurel and Hardy pushing the piano up flight after flight of stairs until, right at the top, it gets away from them and slides right back down. That's the economic history of the Soviet Union in a nutshell: ascent, followed by pratfall.

But this shouldn't be the kind of comedy in which we laugh from a position of comfy security at the fools over there; and not just because the ascent of the Soviet piano was achieved at a monstrous price in human suffering. It should be the comedy of recognition we register, at this point in the early 21st century, when we're in mid-pratfall ourselves. Our own economic arrangements are currently generating not one but two complete sets of disastrous unintended consequences. Our failure to price the externalities of our energy use is baking the climate; our romantic indulgence of financiers has imploded our finances. We should be laughing at the Soviet disaster ruefully – with sympathy.

Don't get me wrong. The Soviet Union was a horrible society. Even once it had stopped purposely killing its citizens in large numbers, it oppressed them, it poisoned them with a toxic environment, it stuffed their ears continually with nonsense, it demanded their absolute passivity. It wasted their time. This last item sounds trivial. It wasn't. It had been one of the main points of the Marxist indictment of capitalism that it obliged people to bleed their labour-time into producing things they could feel no connection to, commodified things which had no real qualities except their price. Capitalism, Marx had argued, was a meaning-vampire, sucking away lives. Yet the Soviet attempt at an alternative came up with something worse: a form of work so divorced from usefulness that it condemned people to squander their finite store of weeks and months and years on churning out stuff you couldn't even be sure they were willing to pay for. By trying to concentrate directly on the use of things instead of their prices, the Soviet system lost hold of the one guarantee that anyone needed what was being manufactured. Result: futility, on the grand scale.

And when Soviet citizens went home from their pointless toil with their roubles in hand, they were then systematically disadvantaged as consumers. Soviet planners had done this deliberately at first, as a matter of strategy, to maximise the resources available for future investment, but under Khrushchev they tried to stop, and found they couldn't. The logic of the whole system compelled it. In a world where you'd get into trouble if you inconvenienced a factory waiting for its supply of widgets (so long as the factory had good enough connections), you could inconvenience a shopper looking for cheese with impunity, with no bad consequences at all. So the cheese, and the shopper, were always last on the list – an afterthought in an economy that was supposed to run entirely for human benefit. Contemporary joke: the phone rings at Yuri Gagarin's apartment and his little daughter answers it. "I'm sorry," she says, "Mummy and Daddy are out. Daddy's orbiting the earth, and he'll be back at 19:00 hours. But Mummy's gone shopping for groceries, so who knows when we'll see her again."