The meme about Soviet equality is pretty misleading. Their particular brand of autocracy increased inequality if anything, just expressed in different ways.

There's a lot to criticise about the Soviet system, just as there is any in totalitarian culture - but in science and engineering, "hammering everyone down to the bottom" is simply not what happened.

You could make at least as strong a case for "hammering most people down to the bottom" in the US, because easy and affordable access to high quality education certainly isn't considered a public good, and plenty of talented people are excluded from it.

For example, Swiss are very social people. Up until recently they did not even have a minimal wage defined in some of the cantons, yet even the worst jobs are usually extremely well payed. I.e. a python developer has just like 2x more than a garbage man. Anything a human touches is expensive.

In European countries, even some of the Eastern ones, there is usually a top-notch single payer health care system. That's social.

You can also have a high quality state funded education systems. A social aspect of politics does not require you to go all dictatorial suppressing basic rights. Please stop using it. It's ridiculous.