After following vastly different trajectories over the course of the twentieth century, in the twenty-first century the Russian Federation and the United States have converged on one striking statistic: in each country the top 10 percent of earners today take home nearly half of total income. This makes both countries outliers among the world’s leading nations. In the United States income inequality began to soar in the 1980s; in Russia it took off in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as documented in a careful analysis by the French economist Thomas Piketty and coauthors.
In the current issue of the Russian Social Science Review we have gathered studies on social and economic inequality from a wide variety of Russian journals reflecting a range of ideological profiles.
—P.A.K.