When a state abolishes the market and goods are handed out rather than sold, money loses its pull and personal contacts take its place. People survive by trading favours through networks of friends, summed up in the saying that one needs not a hundred roubles but a hundred friends. Even the language shifts: you no longer buy things, you 'get hold of' them, and they are 'given out' rather than sold.
Even an all-powerful state seldom wins outright against everyday needs; it often has to settle for less than it demanded, like tolerating private garden plots and privately owned cows instead of fully collective farms. Citizens, for their part, learn to present themselves as the deserving poor and treat food, clothing and shelter as the state's duty to provide. Neither side fully wins, and daily life settles into a grudging bargain.
A society that abolishes class in the name of equality can produce a stricter hierarchy, where your position and who protects you decide what you can obtain. Each official has a patron above and clients below, forming a pyramid of little bosses down to the lowest level. Status, not income, determines access to scarce goods and privileges.
When shortages of food, clothing and housing become permanent, getting the basics turns into a full-time skill rather than a routine errand. Shopping becomes a survival skill, and people bend institutions to fit the shortage: fake marriages for housing, renting out corners of rooms, divorced couples still sharing one flat. A society meant to be organised around production ends up organised around obtaining necessities.
When the top leadership gives only general 'signals' rather than explicit instructions, local officials guess and often overshoot. The centre then spends much of its time undoing what its own representatives did, while ordinary people face rules that seem arbitrary and absurd, such as shaving oneself becoming an offence once a factory hired a barber. The result is a state that is everywhere present yet unpredictable.