Soviet rulers encouraged envy among their citizenry.

Look at what Thomas E. Woods, Jr., wrote about how Soviet rulers “encouraged greed in the ruling class and apathy, envy, and alienation among everyone else”:

The Supreme Soviet’s Anatoly Sobchak once remarked, “Our people cannot endure seeing someone else earn more than they do. … They are so jealous of other people that they want others to be worse off, if need be, to keep things equal.” Sobchak described this attitude as one of the chief obstacles to economic reform. Television personality Dmitri Zakharov put it this way: “In the West, if an American sees someone on TV with a shiny new car, he will think, ‘Oh, maybe I can get that someday for myself.’ But if a Russian sees that, he will think, ‘This bastard with his car. I would like to kill him for living better than I do.'” That is what Marxism-Leninism did to these people.

Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion, p 76