Originally Posted by jadis

For example, the societal division in pre-Revolutionary Russia was based on "sosloviya" (such as nobility, clergy, peasants, merchants, townsmen etc), not classes. In order to bring society towards something resembling Marxist ideas of class the communists had to do a lot of purges of "counterrevolutionary class enemies" in the 1920s and 1930s and even then a lot of confusion remained.



If we're talking about Russia, which is the only east bloc country I know anything about, then not exactly. The main groups were workers, collectivized peasants (kolkhoznoe krestyanstvo) and the intelligentsia, but after the death of Stalin and the end of the purges there wasn't a palpable socioeconomic distinction between the urban proletariat and the intelligentsia. My grandparents, both school teachers, raised my mom in a single room in a communal apartment which they shared with builders and factory workers. By the time I was born we had our own apartment but the building we lived in housed academics and factory workers alike. Everyone got the same salary of around 100 rubles a month. Belonging to the intelligentsia in late Soviet Russia wasn't a "class marker".

Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien

There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.