> The "social capital" was based on the proximity to the ruling minority. The power was greatly centralized so there weren't many of those type of families. Majority had all same: same stuff like photocopied all over the place.
Sounds like something from a school history textbook. It was way more complicated than that; the "ruling minority" or proximity to it was nearly irrelevant to most people (and also a direct threat - you stayed away from these people and their 'friends' as much as you could), what mattered more was your street's communist committee, the teachers at schools, if you wanted to have nicer (or any at all) stuff, then you had to know the shopkeepers, if you wanted your child to go to a high school, you had to know the principal, if you wanted your child to go to university, then the whole family had to have a clean and pro-communist record, if you wanted to visit a doctor, you had to know them or bring something (not necessarily money - money was not that useful), if you wanted to have a okay-ish workplace then... (I could go on forever)
In my previous comments, I was talking mainly about the 90's and early 00's - post-communism. I'm also not a Russian, I'm as west as communism got.
Well, you were apparently too far from that ruling minority. At the level of the shopkeepers/teachers/etc.
For the positions like for example even drivers for the high party members it starts getting unequal.
And about the nineties: inequality in the nineties is weird because very large amount of the criminals who got rich didn't bother to educate their children. Of course, some part of them opted for expensive teachers/schools or for sending children to the Western schools, but the "getting by force" attitude of the parents didn't really mesh well with learning.
Everyone was "too far" and no one wanted to be close, it was more of a death sentence than anything else, not a good price for not that much better life. You're talking at most about hundreds of people - out of hundreds of millions (in the Eastern Bloc as a whole).
Sounds like something from a school history textbook. It was way more complicated than that; the "ruling minority" or proximity to it was nearly irrelevant to most people (and also a direct threat - you stayed away from these people and their 'friends' as much as you could), what mattered more was your street's communist committee, the teachers at schools, if you wanted to have nicer (or any at all) stuff, then you had to know the shopkeepers, if you wanted your child to go to a high school, you had to know the principal, if you wanted your child to go to university, then the whole family had to have a clean and pro-communist record, if you wanted to visit a doctor, you had to know them or bring something (not necessarily money - money was not that useful), if you wanted to have a okay-ish workplace then... (I could go on forever)
In my previous comments, I was talking mainly about the 90's and early 00's - post-communism. I'm also not a Russian, I'm as west as communism got.