essentially half of your rebuttal is unsourced “no bro, that’s not true”
It's both information and argumentation - the statements you can discard, maybe I'm lying, but the fact that it's possible for a bureaucratic elite to not formally own anything yet factually own a country by itself should be something easy to agree with, no? And I'm bringing your attention to it.
Really hard to find sources for something as obvious.
Income inequality figures are bullshit
Yes, because the stated value of Soviet ruble was irrelevant in a planned economy in a bureaucratic state. Should be easy to grasp the causation.
elites didn’t own and they dont own today either (false, oligarchs in modern Russia do own their companies)
Yes, Putin doesn't own his palaces, and any high-ranking official in Russia most likely has much more than they own. What they show is a drop in the sea of what they really control and use.
Oligarchs are a bit like publicity figures, they are one order of magnitude less significant that anybody in the actual ruling group. Sort of ambassadors.
Think of it like of mafia properties. It was similar in the USSR, the elites used and controlled a lot of state properties which nobody else used and controlled. Why would you need to formally own that if you own the state machine?
kulaks didn’t exist (Do you think peasants in 1917 majorly owned the lands they were working??),
Peasants who owned the land they were working were called "kulaks" in propaganda and repressed, because they were a bit less of a herd of ignorant illiterate animals who'd just obey orders.
And Stolypin's reforms were aimed exactly at changing the ratio. And they were succeeding, except WWI happened.
and military industry were just false too
Military industry is the main thing all this was intended for until Stalin's death.
Lmao, so essentially slavery, just without the racial component of the US.
You do realize USSR didn't change that part, just rearranged it, right? At least until Khruschev.
the USSR was a shining example of what socialism could achieve, right in Europe.
Even in the 30s people were starting to doubt its shine. In 20s - oh yes, when you read things from that time, you feel amazed at how real it feels, people really believing into that steel monster.
