Take everything away and divide it, equalization of wages and housing

The myth of “equalization” in the USSR is often based on a phrase from Bulgakov’s “Heart of a Dog”: “Take everything, and divide it,” uttered by Sharikov, a former alcoholic with a criminal past. In fact, neither Marx nor other classics of Marxism proposed this, and technically it is impossible to create a society with completely equal income for everyone.

In the Soviet Union, salaries were not equal: a primary school teacher, a high school teacher and a university professor received different salaries depending on qualifications and mental work. The difference between the minimum and maximum wages was several times, and not hundreds and thousands, as it is today. There was no “equalization” in housing either - from communal apartments and dormitories to individual apartments and houses. Although in the late 1980s in some industries workers' salaries approached those of engineers, this was a consequence of economic problems, not politics. For most of the history of the USSR, skilled specialists earned significantly more than ordinary workers. Those who contributed more received more - this even applied to distribution on collective farms. Communism did not take away personal belongings, but proposed the socialization of the means of production in order to eliminate the super-rich owners who profit from underpayment of labor.