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Something I want to spell out.
The Soviet Union in the 1980s had about 270 million citizens. About 1/2 were Russians, the rest were everyone else. The Estonians were basically Nordics; the Tajiks basically Afghans; the Chukchi were pushed into Communism from the Mesolithic.
The Soviet Union in the 1980s had about 270 million citizens. About 1/2 were Russians, the rest were everyone else. The Estonians were basically Nordics; the Tajiks basically Afghans; the Chukchi were pushed into Communism from the Mesolithic.
My own ethnic group, the Jews, were something of a white-collar caste: much more urban, much more educated, overrepresented in white-collar occupations, especially professional and managerial ones, compared to the Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian) majority.
The Soviets had much more government power to affect the society than anything left-wing American politicians (Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. AOC) dream about. Yet they could not achieve equality of outcomes between the 100+ officially recognized ethnic groups.
Anatoly Chernyaev was a high Soviet official who kept a diary; its English translation is on the site of George Washington University. Reading it, one can trace the roots of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
In 1984, he listened to a report by the head of Soviet Turkmenia. 66 years after the October Revolution, it lived under Sharia law, with thousands of underground mullahs, bride price up to 10,000 rubles [my dad's monthly salary was 240 rubles]. The KGB even discovered Islamists.
He also listened to a report about Soviet Uzbekistan. In Tashkent, half a million people lived in clay huts with no running water, sewage, gas or electricity, while the Party elite had mansions in the city, villas in the countryside and up to five cars.
In 1987, my family vacationed in Estonia. Our farmer-firefighter host ranted about how the Soviets were "playing trifles for 70 years: raise your hand, lower your hand, raise your hand, lower your hand. One must work!"
Almost 30 years after the Soviet Union broke up, Estonia is a member of the EU, NATO and OECD, while Uzbekistan is infamous for forced labor in its cotton fields and Turkmenistan for its dictators' personality cult and political prisoners. And the Jews have largely emigrated.
So, in a multicultural multiethnic society, the government cannot achieve equality of outcomes between ethnic groups. It just cannot. The only thing it can do is mass repression, like what China is doing now to the Uyghurs or the USSR did to the Crimean Tatars and Chechens.
Actually, Chernyaev's diary for 1984 isn't translated, only for 1985 and some other years. This is the Russian original: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/rus/text_files/Chernyaev/1984.pdf
