Let it only be no war: 75-80% of Russians are ready to endure destitution and poverty for a long time

When calculating the level of poverty by the method of deprivation, the corresponding indicator in Russia will be twice as high as stated in the official statistics, Nikolay Kolomeytsev, a Communist Party deputy in the State Duma, told the online publication URA.RU: “We have reached extreme levels of poverty. According to official statistics, it is about 20%. And if you count, there is such a method of deprivation, I think it is more correct, and then there will be somewhere 40%".

The deprivation methodology for calculating the poverty level is based on a direct analysis of the degree of satisfaction of needs. The list of deprivations itself is determined either by expert advice or with the help of the respondents themselves. For example, the list may include questions about whether the respondent has the opportunity to afford meat or fish dishes at least twice a week, or whether he can make repairs in the apartment in case of emergency, experts say.

Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that in 2020 the poverty level in Russia was 13.5%. He stressed that it is planned to reduce this figure to 6.5% by 2030.

However, the analyst Anatoly Nesmiyan strongly doubted that the given figures can be called poverty. Poverty is a state between poverty and the average level (in Russia its lower limit is equal to 6 minimum wages, or 75 thousand rubles per capita), in this case, poverty is called poverty, a condition in which a person is not able to provide himself with even the minimum basic set goods and services. For example, in order not to starve, he stops paying for utilities.

Poverty is also distinguished by its irreversibility, poor people, unlike the poor, are not able to get out of this state without outside help. Therefore, in Russia - 40% are not poor, but beggars, and this can already be considered a social catastrophe, similar to those in which the poorest states of Africa, Asia and Latin America live. It erupted because over the years the national wealth was redistributed in favor of a very small group of thieves in power, without the rest of them having access to it. Since the country has already passed the critical point, only self-liquidation follows, which, according to the analyst, will only accelerate in a pandemic - after all, Russia ranks second in the world in excess mortality. The defeat of the healthcare system several years ago led to a catastrophic decline in the health of the country's citizens, which in turn made them extremely vulnerable to both coronavirus and other mass diseases.

However, scientists from the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences are not inclined to believe that events in Russia will develop according to a catastrophic scenario, as Nesmiyan is sure of this. Quite different conclusions can be drawn from the results of the study "Social mobility in an increasingly complex society: objective and subjective aspects", in which experts cited the main life attitudes of two opposite strata in Russia - the successful stratum of "leaders, specialists, Europeanized-Americanized middle class" and other Russians, "Russia of Rooted Poverty". The approximate ratio of the two strata, based on other works of sociologists, is 20-25% (“fit into the market”) and 75-80% of “other Russians”.

To begin with, sociologists record:

“The growth of wages in Russia stopped in 2013, and in some industries, wages even decreased in relation to the level of 2010. In such circumstances, there are significant obstacles to consumer mobility, which could at least partially compensate for the“ slowdown ”of mobility lifts. associated with the deteriorating structure of employment”.

The experts clarified the life attitudes of the "poor Russian majority":

"In the lexical constructions among ordinary workers, a cautious assessment of the level of their own incomes is postulated, but at the same time more general characteristics of attitudes towards these losses in the environment of" people like me "appear (" the main thing is to get paid regularly, " , "We live, we eat bread", "not naked and not hungry"), which can be interpreted as low requirements for the bar of economic status in their immediate environment

It should be noted one more angle in the perception of social status: the desire to avoid the symbolic fatal point of rollback is the refrain "if only there was no war", although in the life experience of this generation there was no real experience of war, therefore in this context it sounds rather as a designation of the border of the bar "survival" - "if only it was not worse." An undemanding attitude to economic status manifests itself along one more “tension line” - when describing low incomes, subjective satisfaction with the situation is manifested: “I don’t want anything else”, “everything suits” as a lack of motivation to improve one's economic status.

Among ordinary workers, the “discourse of survival” is predetermined not only by a low level of income, but also by a certain socio-psychological syndrome of poverty. When describing income, they adhere to the “be content with little” matrix: minimum wage, priority in consumption of food and clothing costs. This is a “culture of survival”.

The experts made the following conclusions. For 75-80% of poor Russians, the limit of patience is war and hunger. While these two phenomena do not exist, they will tolerate the established order of things.

For the top 20-25%, what is important is freedom of choice (all kinds of freedoms - movement, speech, disposition of one's own body, consumption, Western culture and attitudes, etc.); they are not ready to impose standards that are alien to them.