On Wed, Mar 6, 2024 at 03:00 PM, hari kumar wrote: > > I believe that you have to dig a little bit deeper without relying on what > the revisionist Khruschevites, and then Brezhnevites say. Or for that > matter what Western economists say.
I hesitate to get into a debate about Stalin vs Trotsky or Stalin vs. Khrushchev since - despite the passions they continue to arouse on the broad Marxist left - the disputes are now mainly of historical interest and have limited contemporary relevance. Moreover, the Soviet data was often murky and inaccessible to researchers and, as is so frequently the case, was selectively drawn on by pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet and pro-Stalinist and anti-Stalinist factions and propagandists to support their political ends. What seems beyond dispute, however, is that, as the European Parliament concedes, “in the Soviet Union, average income in the top 1 % was only 4-5 times higher than that of society as a whole (since then, that ratio has risen to over 20). This relatively egalitarian situation changed dramatically in the early 1990s, as hastily adopted economic reforms abruptly turned the planned economy into a capitalist free market.” https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2018/620225/EPRS_ATA(2018)620225_EN.pdf. Bland’s research to which Hari refers is impressive, but a 2017 paper by Thomas Piketty, Filip Novokmet, and Gabriel Zucman which attempted to examine "Inequality and Property in Russia 1905-2016” seems to contradict it by suggesting that there was, if anything, a slightly lower share of national wealth going to the Soviet elite under Khrushchev than under Stalin. According to Piketty et al, "it is worth pointing out that although monetary inequality has been very low throughout the Soviet period, there are interesting medium term variations. Namely, we observe a very strong compression of the distribution of income during the first stage of the Revolution...followed by a relative enlargement of income hierarchies between 1925 and 1956 during the Stalinist period, a gradual decline between 1956 and 1980, and a rise during the 1980s and at the beginning of the economic reforms.” See, in particular, graphs 8a, 8b, and 8c towards the end of their paper which attempt to plot the respective share of income of the top 1%, top 10%, and population more generally in the USSR and post-Soviet Russia from 1905-2015. However, they do note that "the Soviet elite had access to superior goods, services and opportunities such as access to special shops, vacation facilities, etc. – which in effect could allow the Soviet top 1% to enjoy living standards that in some cases might have been substantially higher than 4-5 times average incomes (though probably quite a bit lower than under Tsarist or in post-Soviet Russia). Unfortunately we have no way to quantify this.” http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/NPZ2017WIDworld.pdf These "invisible earnings" seems to be Hari’s point, channeling Bland. But is it not the case that the elite under Stalin and Khrushchev were essentially one and the same and enjoyed the same privileges?. The data shows the inequality gap only beginning to widen with the growth of Soviet GNP in the aftermath the 1973 rise in oil prices, and then surging after the restoration of capitalism in 1991. I’m in no position to judge the accuracy of the competing claims regarding the relative level of inequality under Stalin and Khrushchev, and I doubt there is an impartial arbitrator who could. Suffice it to say, the differences between the two periods appear to be minor, especially when seen within the context of the enormous reduction in economic inequality in the USSR over the course of its history, and notwithstanding the growing power and privileges enjoyed by the political and administrative leadership after the Russian civil war and death of Lenin. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#29315): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/29315 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/104795089/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
