Could someone please explain?

Not sure what you're asking here. I think your idea of what the Soviet State was might be mistaken.

For every lie I unlearn I learn something new - Ani Difranco

Well, there weren't that many cars... compared to, say some film of New York City at the same time period. Also, those people could have been party officials. They were treated much better than the common man.

As for the homeless people, that definitely occurred during the Soviet Union. Human nature is still human nature, whether it be in a capitalistic society, or a communistic society. That's why each have inequality.





"Hitler! C'mon, I'll buy you a glass of lemonade."

Well first of all, not everyone who sleeps outside is necessarily homeless. They could just be taking a quick nap in the sun, for pleasure rather than necessity.

But to address the substance of your questions, this film was made during the NEP period, before the USSR had a fully collectivized economy, so it wasn't an entirely equal society yet. There was still private property and a limited market economy, so there was a gap in living standards that hadn't been closed yet. Most socialist countries had a transition period of a few years before achieving full socialism. The USSR wasn't fully socialist until the collectivization of agriculture was completed in the early 1930s. Stalin officially declared the USSR a fully socialist country in 1936, 19 years after the October Revolution. In China, the communists came to power in 1949, but the country's economy wasn't fully collectivized until about 1957 or 1958. It takes time to transition to a new economic system. So, this is why there would still have been some homelessness and some decadence in the Soviet Union in 1929.

Also, this was before Stalin's industrialization campaign developed the country and provided it with the means to adequately take care of all its people. Revolution isn't like just flipping a switch and ending up with a perfect society. The Soviet Union started at a very low point. In the first place it was a very underdeveloped country with a small industrial base, and then it was ravaged by World War I and the Russian civil war, which, combined, virtually obliterated even that. It took a lot of time and a lot of hard work to turn the USSR into a modern, industrial, socialist state.

Incidentally, considering where it started, the things the Soviet Union achieved were something close to miraculous. To go from, in the beginning, being a war-ravaged underdeveloped 80% peasant country barely out of feudalism to, a generation later, being an industrial and military superpower that developed modern social services that provided for all its people, defeated Nazi Germany and led humanity into the space age. This is communism, which supposedly "failed". If that was "failure", I have to wonder what in the world success would look like.

The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of history.
-Mao Zedong