Moscow Times
October 7, 2005
Russians Feel Poorer Than Statistics Show
By Alex Fak
Staff Writer
When the Soviet state made millions of schoolchildren intone on the first day of class, "Thank you, the Party, for our bright future," it could hardly have imagined that the brainwashing scheme would turn against its successors.
But this is exactly what happened as the economic security of the Soviet days evaporated. According to several recent surveys, Russians feel poorer than they really are. They fear lurking economic dangers even where economists cannot perceive any -- and blame the government for it all, just as they once credited it for their relative prosperity.
Some 42 percent of Russians consider their financial state "poor" or "very poor," according to a recent report published by consultancy firm FBK in conjunction with the Levada Center. That figure is double what World Bank and government numbers testify about Russian incomes.
To most folks, the solution is simple. Almost 61 percent of respondents told pollsters that it was up to the government to pull the nation out of poverty, while another 15 percent said it was up to businesses to take up the burden of social services. Some 11 percent signed up for a "seize and redistribute" approach.
"The numbers speak for themselves: The feelings of social dependency are extremely high," the authors of the report concluded.
Russians' gloomy assessments stand in striking contrast to those of Americans.
A Time-CNN poll last October found that 19 percent of U.S. taxpayers thought they would benefit from tax cuts on the top 1 percent of earners. Another 20 percent of respondents believed they would reach the top 1 percent in their lifetime.
The attitude of dependency in Russia more closely resembles sentiments in Europe, where people tell pollsters that they have limited control over their economic destiny.
In the FBK/Levada survey, just 8 percent of respondents agreed with the statement, "People should be responsible for their own well-being and not blame the government and society for their problems."
Russians "continue to be poor ... and they are not putting in the effort," said Ekaterina Marushkina, one of the authors of the report. "They can always find someone to blame -- the state, government policies. But when the question turns to 'What can you do about it?' they do not want to discuss it."
Experts point out that in Soviet times, Russians were conditioned to believe that the state would always be there for them.
"Fifteen years ago, people learned that they could not trust the state. But they still have expectations for what the state is supposed to do," Marushkina said.
Article 7 of the Constitution famously defines the Russian Federation as a "social state whose policy is aimed at creating conditions that ensure a decent life and unimpeded development for the individual."
But this is on paper. In reality, people have had more than a decade to learn that things are not so rosy.
"There is a feeling of being abandoned by the state," said Olga Nikitina, a researcher at the Sociology Institute, a part of the Russian Academy of Sciences. "Access to social services has been blocked, so people have to pay for them out of their own wages. If you deprived the French of their social benefits, they'd be staging mass protests too."
Russians' distrust of the state has grown enormously since the Soviet collapse.
Two separate polls released on the seventh anniversary of the 1998 government default found that between 41 percent and 52 percent of Russians felt that a similar default was possible in the near future. At a time when Central Bank reserves are edging toward $150 billion and the government is repaying debt ahead of time, even the most pessimistic economists cannot imagine any realistic scenario under which another state default could occur.
Relatively little of the popular discontent is aimed at business, said Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a researcher who specializes in studying Russia's elites. Entrepreneurs "risk their own money" and people understand that, she said.
As for the public sector, many Russians have the "feeling that the government pays some privileged employees under the table, while neglecting the rest," she said.
What accounts for Russians' exaggerated pessimism is not clear. After all, official statistics show that wages are rising faster than gross domestic product growth and the official unemployment rate has dropped to under 7 percent -- a number that would be envied by Western European stories.
But Russians do not seem to believe any of these figures. The fact that the poor live in such close proximity to the rich might explain some of the pessimism.
According to official figures from the State Statistics Service, income inequality has not increased since 1994. But now, the lower middle class feels its relative poverty "because right next to them live the nouveau riche, who show them how poor they really are," Kryshtanovskaya said.
Another explanation is that people might actually be poorer than the numbers suggest. "The official poverty level is not enough to survive on, so people ... whose incomes are above the minimum nevertheless cannot afford decent living standards," Marushkina said.
The average rise in wages masks the fact that incomes are rising quickly only for the wealthiest and the very poorest households dependent on state assistance, Tatyana Maleva, a noted expert on poverty, pointed out in a recent interview with the Komsomolskaya Pravda tabloid.
This can, however, be balanced by the fact that a large proportion of incomes, even in the public sector, go unreported, so the average Russian probably earns more than statistics suggest.
But a big reason why people feel poorer and more wary than they should is because they were expecting things to get better, sociologists said. "It is frustrating when you have invested your intellect, spirits and health into education and training, and then -- boom -- there's a huge economic transformation and you can't reap any returns on all that work," Nikitina said.