One in Five Russian Workers Now Self-Employed, Reducing Government’s Tax Revenues and Control over Population, Analysts Suggest

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 18 – Rosstat, the Russian government’s statistical agency, reports that 14.2 million Russians, one-fifth of the workforce, are now self-employed, a figure that has risen by 500,000 in the last 12 months and a phenomenon that is reducing the ability of the government to collect taxes, monitor immigrants, and generally control the population.

            Indeed, some experts like Andrey Pavlov of the Zenden Shoe Manufacturing Company, says that this phenomenon is one of the characteristics of the degeneration of post-industrial society and is even ready to speak of “the self-removal of the state from the life of the people” (realtribune.ru/samozanyatost-rezultat-samoustraneniya-gosudarstva-iz-zhizni-naroda/).

            That judgment is justified, he argues, because the state is shifting its responsibilities to corporations and individuals who may or may not be willing to do what is necessary for the economy and the country to function effectively, a judgment shared by others in the Russian capital.

            But there is another way to look at this development: Russians who are self-employed are in a position to take a different and more independent attitude toward the state, something that means this post-industrial development may ultimately play a key role in the transformation of the state into a government if not necessarily into a democratic one.