Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 3 – Despite the
explosive growth in income inequality in Russia since 1991, the views of the Russian
rich and Russian poor there are far less different and distinctive than many think,
a survival from Soviet times suggesting that no “culture of poverty” has yet been
formed there, according to a Moscow scholar.
Svetlana Mareyeva,, a scholar who
specializes on economics and social policy at the Moscow Higher School of
Economics, says that the process of changing those with low incomes into “’a
new periphery’” with entirely different views than those with greater wealth
has not gone very far (opec.ru/1702124.html).
She concludes that “there is still
no serious split in values between the poor and the non-poor in Russia.”
Instead, members of the two groups not only share many values but share them in
roughly equal percentages. As a result, “it
is still early” to speak about “the formation of a special culture of poverty
in Russia.”
But Mareyeva notes, there are
greater differences in values between the young poor and the young non-poor
than there are between the two groups as a whole, an indication that the unity
of values likely is a survival of the Soviet past and that such commonality
will decline over time.
Drawing on studies conducted in
2003, 2012, and 2013 by the Institute for Complex Social Research and the
Institute of Sociology, both of which are part of the Russian Academy of
Sciences, the Moscow scholar investigated the attitudes of those with low
incomes and those suffering from deprivations.
In 2013, the second group, those
poor as defined by deprivations, included about 25 percent of the population of
the Russian Federation. When one adds those defined as poor by income – and the
two overlap but are not identical – she says, the poor make up 30 percent of
all Russians.
According to Mareyeva, the poor,
regardless of how defined, and the non-poor have extremely similar views on the
importance of freedom, material well-being, belief in success only within the
rules, recognition of the right of each to keep whatever he or she earns
honestly, and belief that one should try to have influence over others.
On one issue, the poor and the
non-poor have converged: Over the last decade, she says, the poor have become “less
honest,” that, is they say that income from any source is all right even an
illegal one. Ten years ago, only about one in five of Russia’s poor agreed with
that; now, about one in three do. Over
this period, the share of the non-poor who did remained almost unchanged,
falling from 29 percent to 28 percent, well within the margin of error.
Other differences between the poor
and non-poor exist as well. The poor are far more likely to say that they judge
their jobs by how much they are paid, while the non-poor are more likely to say
that personal interest in what they are doing is more important. As Mareyeva
says, this difference reflects the very different life situations of the two
groups.
Another difference Mareyeva found in
Russia that will not come as any surprise is that slightly less than half of
the poor say that success and failure are “in the hands” of the individual
involved, while slightly more than half of the non-poor do. But the difference between these two groups
in Russia on this point is smaller than in many other countries.
The same pattern holds regarding
non-conformism, the Moscow researcher says. “More than half of the poor
consider that it is better to live lie everyone else,” but “more than half of
the non-poor hold the view that it is better to distinguish oneself from others
than to live like everyone else.”
And she points to another
distinction familiar to students of social stratification elsewhere. Seventy-one percent of the non-poor say that
equal opportunities should be the priority for their society, while far fewer,
54 to 58 percent, of the poor do. Instead, more of the latter seek equality of
outcomes.
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