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Income inequality in Russia over the period of the USSR
(hexbear.net)
Source: Piketty's World Inequality Report 2022
I shared this deep in a dunk thread earlier and figured there's probably many comrades who haven't seen this data. I think it's very good rhetorically because a lot of libs have an incredibly vibes-based impression that the Soviet Union was just an Animal Farm old-boss-same-as-the-new-boss situation.
Instead, this demonstrates that Russia underwent one of the most dramatic inversions of income inequality of any country in recorded history.
For comparison here is the US over the same time period:
China:
And the UK:
I’m not sure the graphs support that conclusion by themselves. The dip in US top 10% occurred simultaneously with Pearl Harbor and the US joining WWII, not the formation of the Soviet Union. For the UK it likewise seems tied to World Wars I and II and decolonization. For WWI it makes sense that it did not impact the US quite as much, especially since the US in fact was a financier of the European nations, and was notoriously unforgiving of war debts. Michael Hudson has argued this debt a major factor in provoking the buildup of Nazi ideology in Germany as France and England directly and indirectly required all of those debts to come from Germany.
The measure in these graphs is inequality of income rather than of wealth. Perhaps nationalization of production during wartime is the causal factor? Unemployment goes way down as people go off to fight or are employed in war manufacture. In any case it’s hard to separate the influences of war and political system on this data.