Probably not, in and of itself.
The utter stupidity of the people in charge of that top-down control—now, that could certainly have been the primary cause.
Yes, top-down control makes it more likely that stupidity in one or a small group of people can spell disaster for millions, but it is not inherently good or evil.
And you don't think top-down systems are uniquely likely to attract evil or selfish people?
I for one do think exactly that. I think that an institutional willingness to bestow significant power on one individual or one group will naturally lead to evil and stupid actions.
Also, top-down systems are not as efficient at allocating goods as markets. Yes, markets have flaws– but it's not political manipulation that has led the overwhelming majority of economists in every cultural setting in the world to conclude that markets are, in general, the optimal distributors of goods. No mind will every be able to organize an economy as well as all the minds of the economy. Spontaneous order ftw!
In sum: a system which basically is less efficient and less likely to get people what they want, which has a natural tendency towards increasing tyranny, and which creates massive disasters if a less than perfectly competent person runs it, is one that is, well, bad. And advocacy for it in the political arena is also bad. Good and bad economic policies are questions of marginal efficiency of delivering goods and services. Soviet administrators were fantastically competent; if you look at their publications, they were way better than most of their NATO counterparts at actually managing organizations, planning supply needs, determining prices, and any kind of mathematically or statistically rigorous element of economics. But it doesn't matter how excellent the people are in a system if the constraints of the system are suboptimal.
In fact, I would contend that, in an perfect system the aggregate results will be entirely independent of whether the most powerful people in it are benevolent or malicious. I think that essentially free markets in a mixed economy get us pretty much the closest to that we can get.
