Ice, you're using arguments that are 40 years old. There are easily identifiable technological reasons why communism did not work back then, most to do with speed of communication and the existence of independent watch dogs.
GDR was not communist, GDR was a state run dictatorship with few social freedoms and a desire to remain independent from everyone around them
USSR was a mess to start with, Imperialist Russia was on shaky ground, the royal family was losing their power and internal conflict was plentiful. At the turn of the century we were hit with WWi, shortly after the Russian Revolution crippled the entire nation where the Red, lead by Lenin under the communism slogan fought against the "white", or the middle and upper classes of the bourgeois. This absolutely destroyed the economic foundation of one of the worlds largest and powerful (at the time) nations. Only a few years later WWII broke out, and unlike America the economic infrastructure of Russia and all of the satellite nations that it later put under its spawn were demolished. Capitalism or Communism, the road to recovery would still have been difficult. Not to mention that Russia now had to control all of these other nations, with their own culture, religion, economic abilities, social needs, etc.
To say that communism failed in the USSR based on a purely ideological grounds is downright insulting, it shows that you have no history knowledge and a very limited understanding of what a nation needs to operate on the world front.
Do you know where Lenin, communism's front man, got his ideas from? A little pamphlet known as the communist manifesto, produced by Karl Marx. It is about 60-70 pages and is nothing more than Marx's own thoughts on where and how society will
progress after capitalism , the key word here is AFTER. Karl Marx, the so called father of "communism" spent his entire life, up until his death, studying
capitalism. His life's work is Das Kapital, a 3 volume collection of political science observations on the birth and the eventual collapse of capitalism.
Many of the things that he wrote about have already presented themselves in America, and many of the things that have been predicted will happen.
Russia jumped a generation, it tried to go from a shaky imperialism straight into communism amidst the social turmoil that has been going on for almost a full century.
America went the route that Marx's predicted. A gradual growth from imperialism into capitalism. But there IS a next step. And if you bothered to read the scholarly literature on the subject and not just listen to FOX news all the time, you would be of a different opinion.
i suggest you start here.
http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Critique-Political-Economy-Classics/dp/0140445684