Comment by PrismCrystal

"For most of its history, nearly everyone in the USSR was a farmer, so not proletariat." They certainly were in the context we are speaking of here. Official Soviet terminology, apparently starting at least from Lenin but I haven’t checked this thoroughly, divided the proletariat into rural proletarians (in Russian селские пролетарии) and urban proletarians (городские пролетарии). In any event, in colloquial contexts the word serves handily to refer to a life of rather menial trudging wherever it’s lived.