All were declared equal, but the General Secretary was declared more equal.

However, that's not the real problem. A society cannot work without some economic and social inequality.

Taking large numbers of people in the early morning hours from their homes, imprisoning and starving and shooting them in the back of the head and burying them in a ditch, that is a problem, and the system that did this survived until 1980's, and now Russia is increasingly nostalgic about it.

I feel gratified that you mentioned this. Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita" obsesses about apartments. I suppose this is because financial opportunities were otherwise constrained. In this story at least cheating seems to have been the norm.