HistoryPhotos

Crossing the Line: Vagrancy, Homelessness and Social Displacement in Russia, chapters 4+5 on the Soviet Union. Alternatively, I believe Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism addresses it, though I'd have to dig it up wherever the fuck it is for a precise citation.

The numbers are somewhat different... in part because both homelessness and joblessness were arrestable offenses that would get you sent to GULAG as slave labor. Complete with a 90%+ redecisivism rate for those convicted of those terrible crimes! Of course, that's only counting the ones who weren't caught again.

Even the numbers that were reported internally (and not given to the public of the period; the official line was that there was no homelessness) are noted to be underestimates, due to the reluctance of many local Soviet officials to make formal arrests for homelessness that would imply to The Party that they were in some way deficient, letting VAGRANTS and ANTI-SOCIAL ELEMENTS arise in THEIR area! Much better to clap them in cuffs for a night, then tell them to go to the next town over; it can be their problem.

It's known by internal Soviet reports that there were some 500,000 'parasites' in the mid-1980s, which was similar to the homelessness rate in the USA at the time. That, of course, presumes that the MVD was trying to make an accurate estimate instead of just counting who had been processed as a 'parasite' by them.