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 mean, the soviet union devalued currency and instead valued political power, and you can see how fast its political elites were able to convert one to the other in 1991.
If you meant devalued and valued to mean “held in esteem” and its antonym, your comment makes no sense because political power in a government that’s collapsing can’t be traded for money, it’s not worth any!
If you meant devalued to refer to reducing the value of the currency on the market as part of trade policy that doesn’t make sense either because after the collapse the rub to usd exchange rate hit almost 100.
So what did you mean?
its political elites were able to convert one to the other in 1991.
Are you aware of how many people’s lives that destroyed? It was the single biggest reduction in living standards for the largest number of people outside of war time in history.
And Yeltsin and his gang of capitalist robbers were hardly representative of the soviet union. They were US-backed compradors. Yeltsin’s fucking campaigns were even planned by the americans.
