Comparing modern Russia with the Soviet Union

Russia's unemployment rate is 5.73%. The Russian Federation's unemployment rate peaked at13.26% in 1998. The Russian Federation's unemployment rate was at its lowest in 2019 when it was 4.6%. The source for those figures is MacroTrends. Maurice Dobb's Soviet Economic Development Since 1917 states that the unemployment problem "was only to disappear and give way to labour scarcity as a result of the large constructional activity of the first two years of the First Five Year Plan." This is supported by the findings in José Luis Ricón's “The Soviet Union: Achieving full employment”, Nintil (2016-07-30). The CIA Factbook, by no means a pro-Soviet source, estimated that between 1% and 2% of the Soviet population was unemployed during 1990. According to The Borgen Project, 3.5% of the Russian population is homeless. That is five million people. 13.3% of Russia's population live in poverty which amounts to 19,218,500 people. "according to a secret MVD report obtained by Agence France-Presse several years ago, at least 500,000" homeless in the USSR.


If the above figure is accurate that would mean homelessness has increased tenfold in the Russian Federation.

"governments in the Communist countries succeeded in providing nearly-free housing for all workers. Rents were set at 5 per cent of income (in the UK today we spend 52 per cent of our income on rent, and 72 per cent in London). Citizens were provided with brand new dwellings with central heating, hot water and electricity, which was unusual for the USSR at that time."

81% of the Russian Empire's subjects were officially peasantry in the 1857 census.
Donald Mackenzie Wallace (1905). "CHAPTER XXVIII. THE SERFS". Russia.

""The economy of the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century was a complicated hybrid of traditional peasant agriculture and modern industry. The empire's rapidly growing population (126 million in 1897, nearly 170 million by 1914) was overwhelmingly rural."

That means there were 138,119,003 serfs in the Russian Empire before the Tsar was deposed.

"The USSR managed to reduce inequality and poverty with respect to pre-revolutionary times, and it did deliver in bringing a level of equality comparable to that of Nordic social democracies." Ricón, José Luis, “The Soviet Union: poverty and inequality”, Nintil (2017-03-14) The Soviet Union lifted over 100 million out of poverty. With the sabotage of the Soviet Union and the creation of the Russian Federation, over 100 million fell into poverty.
Soviet Life, Volumes 196-207
Strayer, R., 2001. Decolonization, democratization, and Communist reform: The Soviet collapse in comparative perspective. Journal of World History, pp.375-406.
Zubok, V.M., 2021. Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union. Yale University Press.

The Russian Federation has the 11th largest nominal GDP, 6th largest GDP PPP, 64th largest nominal GDP per capita, and the 55th largest GDP PPP per capita according to the IMF. According to the World Bank, Russia's GINI coefficient is 37.5.

Between 1928 and 1970 the USSR was "the second most successful economy in the world."
Allen, R.C., 2001. The rise and decline of the Soviet economy. Canadian Journal of Economics, pp.859-881.

According to the CIA Factbook, the Soviet Union had the second-largest GDP and the 28th largest GDP per capita.

The Soviet Union had a GINI coefficient between 0.290 and 0.275.
Alexeev, Michael V. "Income Distribution in the USSR in the 1980s". Review of Income and Wealth (1993). Indiana University.

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