Starting Point of the Transformation. In a Circle of Shortages, Rationing and Privileges: Polish and Ukrainian Experiences and the Debates about Central Planning and Social Equality

The article tries to systematize the mechanisms behind durable inequalities and societal differentiation in the centrally-planned economies of the Soviet type, using the examples of Poland after 1945 and the Soviet Ukraine. It tries to contradict the theses present in the popular discourse (and some recent revisionist literature as well) about the so-called real socialism as a system ensuring equality combined with adequate level of social services. The text is based mainly on the existing, although dispersed, literature on the issue, often written by sociologists, but also economic historians and economists. The need to obtain access to scarce consumer goods was decreasing substantially the real incomes of the part of the population having no formal or informal access privileges given by the authorities, thus skewing the relatively equal distribution of nominal incomes. Different forms of networking and informal deals were also distracting the labour force from normal duties, which resulted in significant supply-side inefficiencies, not only in the income inequality. Those burdens on the centrally planned economy were, in some extent, advantageous to the maintenance of the political control of the communist party over society. A brief comparison of Polish and Ukrainian experiences shows much greater dependency of population from the authorities in that dimension in Soviet Ukraine, which reflects the greater scope of authoritarianism in the political system of Soviet Union. That was meaning also the worse starting point for systemic transformation for the economy of newly independent Ukraine than it used to be in the case of Poland.