No Longer Able to Qualify for Loans, Russians Increasingly are Turning to Pawnshops and Selling Off Not Just Jewelry but Essentials

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 19 – There are many measures of economic hardship among the poor, but one of the most accurate and disturbing is when people cannot get small loans because banks have tightened the rules, they are forced sell off whatever they have in pawnshops in order to survive.

            That is what is happening in Russia, with the Bank of Russia reporting that in the first half of 2025, pawnbrokers extended 190 billion rubles (2.3 billion US dollars) to Russians who had nowhere else to turn (newizv.ru/news/2026-02-19/perforator-za-edu-kak-lombardy-v-2026-godu-stanovyatsya-edinstvennym-bankom-dlya-naroda-438823).

            But the situation is even worse than that massive figure suggests. Before 2025, 90 percent of pawnbroker loans involved jewelry, something most people could afford to live without; but last year, the share of jewelry as a percentage of all things traded to pawnbrokers for money fell to 40 percent with the difference including equipment that people need for work or their lives.

            And what is perhaps most disturbing, Russians are selling such essentials to pawnbrokers for 30 to 50 percent less than they paid for them and will have to pay again if these things are to be replaced, yet another way that the economic decline in Russia is pushing ever more people there into poverty and casting a dark shadow on their futures for years to come.