To blame equality for problems caused by systems that never implemented anything like equality is quite bizarre.
…the story about the two fellows in the Soviet Union who were walking down the street and one of them says: Have we really achieved full communism? Is this it? Is this now full communism?
The other one said: Oh no, things are gonna get a lot worse.
It doesn't matter. There provably wasn't equality.
So whether or not what they had was socialism (which, by the way, does not require equality in any case) is entirely irrelevant to the argument.