which inequality soared. At approximately the same time, Britain’s prison population doubled, whereas it rose only modestly if at all elsewhere – and actually fell in Finland during the 1990s. Wherever the increases occurred, it was overwhelmingly the poorest and blackest who were imprisoned, which fits with another finding: that racist attacks are more common in more unequal societies.6
Those who defend inequality sometimes say it’s needed because it rewards ambition; social mobility and equality of opportunity are what matter most, they say. Yet social mobility is lower in more unequal societies than in less unequal ones. Even the politically conservative journal The Economist has repeatedly focused on this phenomenon over the years7 – and it is especially true in the ‘land of opportunity’ itself, the US.
Extending back in time, the statistics reveal that the trend toward greater inequality, and the harms that flow from it, began in earnest in the 1970s – in other words, Wilkinson ‘hadn’t seen nothing yet’ when he wrote his article, and nor had Douglas Black’s committee. This reversed a trend towards greater equality that had started just after the Great Depression (which started in the US in 1929, with the Wall Street crash, but slightly earlier in the UK, with reversion to the gold standard). In Britain, inequality had fallen most rapidly during the Second World War – and public health improved faster than at any other time in the country’s history.8 The gains were generally attributed to egalitarian measures, such as rationing, which ensured that many people had enough to eat for the first time, and everybody had a reasonably balanced diet, even if it was an extremely meager one by today’s standards. There was a general turn away from ostentation. Large cars were taxed more heavily than small ones. The sense of solidarity that made those gains possible made an indelible impression on those who experienced it, with people of all classes recalling how ‘we all pulled together during the War’ – and it paved the way for the introduction of Britain’s welfare state, the National Health Service, and the nationalization of major industries and utilities.
Wilkinson has collated figures that show similar phenomena in the countries of the pre-1990 communist bloc. Health in the Soviet Union improved steadily until the late 1960s, when reforms introduced greater pay differentials.9 Growing inequality was mirrored by a deterioration in public health, and evidence of social breakdown and concerns from the older generation about growing selfishness, long before the Soviet system collapsed. Inequality then took off in earnest in the period known in the West as perestroika (restructuring) but in Russia as katastroika, when male life expectancy in particular collapsed – a period that, it was said, cost more Russian lives than the Second World War.10 The one eastern European country where life expectancy continued to increase during the 1970s and 1980s was Albania – which was following its own independent Maoist line.
Does this imply that, despite the general discrediting of the communist period and the unquestionable tyranny of Stalin’s regime, the Soviet Union did at least tackle inequality? Egalitarianism was a huge social force in Russia before, during and after the Revolution, but Soviet leaders rarely gave it a high priority. Real equality was thought to be possible in an ideal communist world of the future, but not feasible in the here and now, and possibly a dangerous distraction that needed to be curbed, violently if necessary.
Writers such as Petr Kropotkin (the Russian aristocrat who became a founder of anarchist thought in the late 19th and early 20th centuries),11 and more recently the US historian Richard Stites,12 have documented the very strong, versatile and egalitarian mutual support systems that flourished among ordinary Russians – the ‘artels’ that people would form to pool wages, food, equipment, living space, in just about every situation imaginable; and the ‘Mir’ or obshchina system of collective land management in the countryside. Stites has described some of the innumerable egalitarian projects that flourished in the years immediately after the 1917 revolution.
The Bolshevik leadership generally thought those traditions backward. Many of them were avid disciples of the ‘scientific management’ approach developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor, and applied with such impressive results in Henry Ford’s factories. They believed in strong managerial control, top-down discipline and incentive systems. Under Stalin, egalitarianism became a dangerous deviance, to be stamped out – a major goal of the purges.
Incentives and ‘perks’ were always present, used at first mainly to keep politically unsympathetic but valuable experts on board. These could arouse forthright popular outrage, but distinctions became steadily entrenched during Stalin’s rise to power in 1928. He launched the Great Terror of 1934-39 with a chilling speech, in which he ridiculed and denounced the ‘levelling’ tendency as ‘leftist chatter’. Stites has described Stalin’s impact:
His hostility – voiced in sarcastic and dismissive terms – was so deep and so clearly enunciated that it rapidly became state policy and social doctrine. He believed in productive results, not through spontaneity or persuasion, but through force, hierarchy, reward, punishment, and above all differential wages. He applied this view to the whole of society. Stalin’s anti-egalitarianism was not born of the five-year plan era. He was offended by the very notion and used contemptuous terms such as ‘fashionable leftists’, ‘blockheads’, ‘petty bourgeois nonsense’, and ‘silly chatter’, thus reducing the discussion to a sweeping dismissal of childish, unrealistic and unserious promoters of equality. The toughness of the delivery evoked laughter of approval from his audiences.13
The tough, scornful, ‘realistic’ tone of Stalin’s speeches is not without its echoes in the capitalist world, where the same conviction prevails that ‘you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs’.14
The ‘apparatchik’ culture was felt right through Soviet society, and was resented. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has described how, during some of the most desperate fighting in the Second World War, new insignia of rank and even Tsarist-style ‘shoulder-boards’ reappeared in the army, and The Internationale (‘rise up, you wretched of the earth!’) was replaced as the Soviet anthem by the dirge-like ode to the ‘homeland of Lenin’, which became familiar at post-War Olympics. The ‘party maximum wage’ was formally abolished in 1932 and by the late 1930s members of the ruling elite were being paid 10 to 30 times what a worker could earn, plus enjoying free furniture and other perks.15 In the 1970s the dissident physicist, Yuri Orlov, calculated that party heads were paid about 25 times the salary of an ordinary worker.16 This was only slightly less than the pay gap in the US between chief executives and workers at that time (a 30-fold difference), but much less than it became in 2005 (110 times).17
Despite this onslaught, egalitarianism remained the bedrock of Soviet society, and it produced the sorts of outcomes we would expect: it outspent the UK fourfold on education per person in 1959.18 The number of pupils in the top four grades of high school rose from 1.8 million in 1950/1 to 12.7 million in 1965/6.19 The population recovered with astonishing rapidity from its multiple extreme traumas (the First World War, the Civil War and Wars of Intervention, collectivization, the purges, and then the Second World War).20
After Stalin’s death Nikita Khrushchev tried to restore more egalitarian pay policies and even initiated one in which managers and foremen were paid less than ordinary workers.21 This coincided with the upswing in public health mentioned above, which ran out of steam in the late 1960s, after Khrushchev was ousted.
The Soviet Union’s greater equality comes down to two things. First, the whole edifice rested on a persistent and deep culture of solidarity and egalitarianism described by historians like Stites, and by veterans of the Soviet period. Second, the inequalities mentioned above were all ones of income, not wealth. Individuals could not accumulate the kinds of private fortunes enjoyed by elites elsewhere. Almost all
