The October Revolution produced a memorable spectacle. As one commentator later described it:

Of course, as Sovietologists well know, this venture into extreme egalitarianism was abandoned more than five decades ago, when Stalin himself denounced “the ‘Leftist’ practice of wage equalisation.” Yet, to this day, many Westerners remain curious about social stratification in the Soviet Union – the first country born of a Marxist revolution to overcome the injustices of capitalist class systems.

The question of Soviet stratification has much to recommend it, not just to Sovietologists but to social scientists in general. New findings on stratification could facilitate efforts to test or generalize Western findings. Consider, for example, the proposition that social perceptions help transmit social status from parent to child. As Bowles and Gintis state, in a much acclaimed analysis of schools in capitalist American society: “Youth of different racial, sexual, ethnic, or economic characteristics directly perceive the economic positions and prerogatives of ‘their kind of people.’ By adjusting their aspiration accordingly, they … reproduce stratification on the level of personal consciousness.”