Social stratification in Soviet Russia, 1991: Inequality of opportunity and outcome

This dissertation examines social stratification in Soviet Russia in 1991 using some of the best data ever available on Russia. It explores Soviet social stratification through the analysis of inequality of outcome and opportunity. Inequality of outcome is assessed using two indicators of standard of living: (1) per capita household income; and (2) a consumer goods scale. The latter measure is crucial for an evaluation of inequality in Soviet Russia because the meaning of money is problematic under state socialism. The consumer goods scale used here not only provides a better proxy for standard of living under state socialism than income but also allows for an assessment of the meaning of money in this non-market system. Inequality of opportunity is assessed through analyses of the processes governing the determination of earnings and consumer goods acquisition, using ordinary least squares regression. All analyses performed on the Russian data are compared with data from a comparable American survey. The American data provide a yardstick by which the Russian results can be measured. More importantly, however, the comparative aspect of this project allows for a furthering of our knowledge of stratification not only under state socialism but also under market-type stratification systems. The meaning of income and of occupation in the West seem deceptively clear, and have consequently remained theoretically unspecified. In applying these concepts to such a different context as state socialism, however, we are forced to struggle with the theoretical assumptions we unconsciously make in the West about the roles these two factors play in the stratification process; applying models of social stratification that have been designed for market societies to a non-market setting illuminates these assumptions.