Society: Polarization, Degradation, and Deviance
The impoverishment of the many and enrichment of the few had a profound, polarizing impact on society. Whereas the Soviet regime engaged in egalitarian ‘levelling’ (especially in the post-Stalin era), the post-Soviet order was unabashedly anti-egalitarian. One index of economic stratification, the decile ratio (comparing the income of the top 10 per cent with the bottom 10 per cent), leaped from a relatively egalitarian 4 : 1 (1990) to 15 : 1 (1994) and remained at that level for the rest of the 1990s. Another measure is the Gini coefficient, with 0 being total equality, 1.00 total inequality; analysts regard 0.20–0.30 as relatively egalitarian, and anything over 0.40 a sign of growing income disparity and inequality. In Russia’s case, the coefficient jumped from 0.26 in 1991 and climbed to 0.40 in 1999. Although increasing inequality also characterized Western societies in the 1980s and 1990s (the Gini index, for example, rising to 0.31 in Western Europe and 0.43 in the United States), the differentiation in Russia was both more extreme in scale and more compressed in time.
The minuscule élite of wealthy Russians—derisively called ‘new Russians’, a pejorative for the uncouth nouveau riche—were in fact not so new: approximately two-thirds of them, especially the first wave, used their party, especially Komsomol (the communist youth organization), connections to acquire assets and amass capital. They went from party cards, not rags, to riches. Mikhail Khodorkovskii, at one point the wealthiest billionaire in Russia, began in the Komsomol organization, where he used its connections and resources to start a computer business that eventually turned into a huge financial and industrial empire. Much the same was true of the other tycoons. Apart from buying political influence and special privileges, such ‘entrepreneurs’ often had ties with organized crime—an association admitted by some 40 per cent in one poll, with the real rate doubtless being much higher. Ironically, Soviet criminalization of the black market forged a natural link between economic and ordinary criminals, producing a close nexus between the new market economy and organized crime.
But it was a corrupt state, not the Komsomol or organized crime, that enabled the richest to appropriate state property on a massive scale. In most cases, the new economic élite relied heavily upon insider connections, especially during the ‘shares-for-loans’ in 1996–8. Not that the chief officials were unaware of what was happening. Anatolii Chubais, the architect of privatization (which earned him approval abroad and opprobrium at home), told an interviewer in 1997 that the oligarchs ‘are stealing absolutely everything …. But let them steal and take property; they will become owners and decent administrators of that property.’ Beneath the Olympian heights of the ‘seven oligarchs’ was a small stratum of lesser winners who occupied key positions and profited accordingly. The proliferation of luxury imports (more top-of-the-line Mercedes being sold in Moscow than in Europe), the construction of palatial mansions, and the flood of spendthrift Russians to élite shops and resorts in the West all attested to the fabulous wealth of the ‘new Russians’.
Well below them was a small middle class, with modest resources and incomes but a few times the average wage—though light years removed from the élites. It was partly on the basis of cultural, occupational, and educational descriptors that they imagined themselves to be part of a ‘middle class’. However, compared with those on subsistence wages, this middle class enjoyed access to Western goods unimaginable in Soviet times. Private car ownership, while increasing in the 1970s and 1980s, doubled in the 1990s (jumping from 63.5 to 128.1 per 1,000 residents) and included vast numbers of imports. Still, this ‘virtual middle class’—in terms of sheer size, assets, income, and political influence—bore scant resemblance to its peer in Western Europe.
At the bottom was the mass of society—the disprivileged and dispossessed. About half of this underclass consisted of the ‘working poor’, those whose disposable income plunged by two-thirds in the 1990s and, for most of them, was unpaid and in arrears. The working poor included most civil servants and state employees (for example, teachers and doctors) as well as those trapped in unprofitable or mismanaged enterprises. It helped little when the employers offered to ‘pay’ the wages in kind, such as gas pistols, coffins, and brassieres; teachers in Altai were first offered toilet paper, then funeral accessories, and finally vodka to settle their wage arrears. The other half of this underclass found itself below the poverty line (that is, had an income beneath the subsistence minimum). They included the unemployed (a category unknown in Soviet times, but—by conservative calculations—reaching 14 per cent of the workforce in 1999), the elderly (whose pensions were devalued by hyperinflation), single-parent families, and an array of social outcasts—the homeless, waifs, the disabled, and refugees from the Caucasus and other areas of conflict. Although estimates vary, in 1999 the CIA estimated that 40 per cent of the Russian population—over fifty million people—were below the poverty line (compared to 12 per cent in the United States). Although official figures can overstate the scale of the problem (since they do not take into account tax evasion, black-market earnings, and the subsistence gardening that augmented the declared incomes), the level of poverty was none the less extraordinary, whether measured by Soviet or Western standards.
One revealing index of immiseration was demographic decline: from 148.6 million 1993 to 146.3 million in 2001. This population decrease was partly due to a low birth rate (among the lowest in the world), but chiefly to a sharp increase in mortality. One revealing indicator was the drop in life expectancy, which peaked at 65 for men and 75 for women in 1985 but had dropped to 59 for men and 72 for women in 2000. While partly due to a high rate of infant mortality (two to three times that of Western countries), higher death rates became pandemic for the working-age population. Particularly revealing was the prospect for a 16-year-old male living to the age of 80: the rate in the United States was 88 per cent, but a mere 58 per cent in Russia—only slightly higher than a century earlier (56 per cent in 1895). Given these dismal patterns, contemporary studies by the United Nations and the Russian Academy of Sciences project that Russia’s initial population of 148.6 million (1993) will shrink to 130 million by 2015 and even drop to 100 million by 2050, perhaps sinking as low as 70 or 80 million. Such a cataclysmic decrease means an immense contraction in labour inputs and, simultaneously, a dangerous imbalance in the proportion of the workforce to pensioners (dropping officially from 2 : 1 in 1991 to 1.4 : 1 in 1999).
Critics attribute this demographic implosion to the destitution engendered by transition. Both nuptiality and fertility fell sharply: fewer married and still fewer bore children, with 70 per cent of pregnancies terminated through abortion. Still more important was the rise in mortality, especially in the middle range of the labour force. That was partly due to a deterioration in diet, with a significant reduction in meat consumption (33 per cent) and dairy products (over 40 per cent). Even with a compensatory increase in carbohydrate consumption, Russian daily caloric intake in the 1990s was only 62 per cent of the norm recommended by the World Health Organization. Bad living habits (astronomic rates of smoking and massive consumption of cheap alcohol) also took a toll; the explosion of prostitution (with 4,000 brothels in Moscow alone) raised sexually transmitted diseases to epidemic proportions (the syphilis rate, for example, increased seventyfold in the 1990s); and the vast increase in drug addiction spawned new scourges like Aids. Russia reported 135,000 officially registered HIV cases, but the real rate was probably five times greater; in specific cases, the increase was of horrifying magnitude—for example, the number of HIV-infected in Tver jumped from 8 in 1997 to 2,342 four years later. Even diseases once thought to be eradicated have roared back in full force; in particular, deadly strains of tuberculosis—widespread in the large prison population—have produced a mortality rate thirty times that of the United States.