Quantifying inequality as good or bad basically comes down to ones politics and opinions anyways, so unless you’d rather be assigned to live out the rest of your life in Russia, 1968, than the USA, 1968, I’d say the topic is moot. For quantifying the quality of life in a nation, the Gini Coefficient isn’t all that much better than the Laffer Curve.
I would voluntarily live in the US (41.1), Switzerland (33.7), or Sweden (25). I would not voluntarily live in Turkmenistan (40.8), Azerbaijan (33.7), nor Afghanistan (27.8).
Let me put it this way:
If your definition of equality is “I want my neighbor to be just as poor as me,” the Gini coefficient is a great metric. If it’s “I’m concerned about the distorting effects of concentrated wealth on political power,” then it’s not a very good metric at all.
Maybe Soviet Russia was genuinely egalitarian. I really have no idea. But even if it was, the Gini coefficient still doesn’t tell you that. You need a metric that measures the thing that you want.
It achieved egalitarianism in terms of making money nearly worthless; but the class system of exploiters and exploited was alive and well, it just was no longer a capitalist system of exploitation.
There was plenty of inequality in the Soviet economy. It just manifested itself in a different way. In a Western system, inequality was based on income. Some people have low incomes and some people have high or even ridiculously high incomes.
In the Soviet Union, inequality was based around spending. Everyone had pretty similar incomes. But one person was allowed to shop at a store where you could buy a car for $1000 and another person could only shop at a store where the same car cost $10000.
This allowed people who wanted to do so to simply look at incomes and marvel at how egalitarian the Soviet economy was while choosing not to look at the unequal aspects of that same system.
What statistical evidence would you expect to exist for a quasi-official and deeply guarded system of privileges for certain people, often based on a black-market?
You seem to be saying that you won’t believe anecdotes about political corruption, you will only believe the tax returns for how much each politician received in bribes. You realise how crazy that standard is?
In East Germany, the communist party bigwigs lived in a gated community called Waldsiedlung. Among East Germans, it was better known as Wandlitz (the name of the nearest town).
If you came from Beverly Hills, you wouldn’t have been impressed at all. But for the average East German, it was a different world.