Meanwhile the fairest economic system ever:
this is such bullshit. the "elite" housing in the thumbnail just resembles the style of housing built in the country from the 1930s up until 1955. in accordance to first the postconstructivist and later the socialist realist architectural styles. those "worker's palaces" were in fact, as the name suggests for ordinary workers and not just societal elites.
meanwhile the latter building resembles a standardized panel-built residential complex built after khrushchevs 1955 speech recommending architectuts to make more economical use of the USSR's limited building resources. while postwar scarcity and haphazard building practices did in fact initially lead to a decrease in living quality, those issues were mostly resolved by the onset of the second generation of Soviet standard industrial housing construction by the 1970s. what all of those complexes have in common though, is that all of them provide a much higher quality of life to the common worker than anything built after 1990.
and yes, certain people, "elites" if you will, did in fact have a considerably higher quality of life than most people, but those differences where negligible in comparison to the Russian empire or any capitalist régime past or present.
