The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 succeeded in changing the fundamental relations of power and property, but it failed to create a society ensuring the equality of its citizens, one in which social stratification is absent. Althouugh the system is more open than before the Revolution, with greater mobility opportunities, inequities still persist. One little reported inequity ijs the substantial gap between the privileged and the poor. In a well-documented study, Poverty in the Soviet Union, Mervyn Matthews(1986) investigated the life-styles of the underprivileged in recent years. He found that in the Soviet Union some two-fifths of the nonagricultural labor force earned less than the minimum state standards. This group involved mostly unnskilled manual and service workers. The incidence of poverty among larger families, peasants, and pensioners is even higher. The present lead-ership under Mikhail Gorbachev initiated large-scale economic reforms in 1987 to be incorporated in the next Five-Year Plan. How effective these reforms will be to alleviate the plight of the poor remains a mattter of conjecture
In sum, during the last 200 years, the productive systems of many societies have undergone a profound change. In this relatively short perod of time, techniques of production and patterns of economic organization that had endured for thousands of years had been replaced by new and radically different ones. These developments have laid the foundation for a new and profoundly different system of stratification in modern society. These developments have also drastically altered power relations, which will be examined in the following section.