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Some ruling socialists take this rhetoric seriously. In radically socialist South Yemen, civil servants' salaries have been cut and luxury goods banned. Under Julius Nyerere's firm socialist hand, Tanzania has been turned into one of the world's most egalitarian societies. The steeply progressive personal taxes of most social democracies, meanwhile, are a way of redistributing wealth.
But in the Marxist-Leninist states, egalitarianism is an empty slogan and socialist rule has become more a dictatorship of praetorians than of the proletariat. In a famous 1957 diatribe, Yugoslav Dissident Milovan Djilas railed against the privileges accorded a "new class" of Communists—party hierarchs, ranking bureaucrats, managers of state enterprises, and superstars in the arts and sports.
The rewards of the new class are not necessarily monetary. The manager of a Soviet chemical plant or the director of a scientific research institute earns about 508 rubles ($726) a month-while President Leonid Brezhnev makes an estimated 2,900 rubles ($4,150). These are mere pittances compared with the $250,000 annual salaries of Jimmy Carter and the chief executive officer of the average large U.S. corporation. But because Marxist-Leninist societies are short of goods, a comfortable life-style depends less on money than on privileged access to scarce materials and services. In capitalist or mixed economies, by contrast, money usually provides access to luxury.
Reports TIME Moscow Bureau Chief Marsh Clark: "The elite here have more of the good things of life vis-a-vis their average countrymen than do the West's richest businessmen in relation to a man on welfare. In the Soviet Union, various grades of apparatchiks have access to special stores that sell imported and otherwise scarce goods at very low prices. Behind a door marked 'Office of Passes' on Granovsky Street not far from the Kremlin, a windowless emporium offers a cornucopia of meats, fruits, vegetables and imported delicacies to the shishki (big shots). The average Ivan and Natasha, however, never see such a selection of goods in the stores at which they must shop. When the shishki become ill, they go to the Kremlin Polyclinic for medical care vastly superior to that available to their fellow countrymen."
Adds TIME'S Aikman: "In Rumania, senior officials have their own villas and even relatively low party functionaries drive automobiles and receive a generous gasoline allowance. The son of Communist Party Boss Nicolae Ceauşescu races around Bucharest in a sleek Mercedes sports coupé. The perks for the Polish elite include special schools for their children and access to luxurious vacation camps and ski resorts. Traffic literally stops for East Germany's new class; at the approach of the imported Volvo limousines carrying the party's top brass, police halt all other movement on the streets."
Not even classless China is exempt from the new elitism. After Mao's 1949 triumph, Chinese Communist leaders immediately moved into villas expropriated from capitalist tycoons and, among other things, designated Peitaiho, one of the country's best seaside resorts, as their exclusive playground. Chauffeured cars ferry the wives of high-ranking Chinese cadres to exclusive shops and their