Ultimately, the trade unions were a boon to post-Soviet capital and state alike: their dwindling relevance delegitimized the idea of unions in workers’ eyes, and at the same time they took up the space that a more independent, combative labour movement could have occupied. This is a very concrete example of Soviet-era institutions providing a subsidy to their capitalist successors, the maintenance of one smoothing the way for the establishment of the other.
After 2000, the turbulence of the previous decade – many Russians described the 1990s as likhie, ‘feverish’ – seemed to abate. Now the watchword was ‘stabilization’, embodied in everything from the gathering economic recovery to the 2004 creation of a Stabilization Fund in which to park the steady flow of oil and gas revenues. By this time Russia’s GDP had finally regained its late Soviet level, and many of the most glaring symptoms of social breakdown had begun to fade: crime rates dropped, health indicators improved, life expectancy began to rise. It seemed to sum up the mood when an annual sociology conference, held since 1993 under the title ‘Where Is Russia Going?’, changed its name in 2003 to ‘Where Has Russia Arrived?’
But whatever stability meant, it did not mean a fundamental reversal of the socio-economic mechanisms set in motion after 1991. Much as Putin’s rule was a prolongation of the substance of Yeltsin’s, so in the social realm the 2000s brought a consolidation and extension of the disparities that had appeared in the 1990s. Overall inequalities of income remained sizeable. The debt default and currency crash of 1998 didn’t do much to narrow the gap: few of the super-rich kept their wealth in roubles, or indeed in Russia.[5] This trend continued and even accelerated under Putin: according to one calculation, by 2014 the financial wealth held by a handful of Russians abroad was equal to the total wealth of the entire population within Russia’s borders.{42} As the number of billionaires continued to grow, the share of national income taken home by the bottom 10 per cent remained tiny, and actually declined after 2000, from 2.2 per cent to 1.9 per cent in 2008.{43}
In one area after another, imbalances that had emerged during the 1990s solidified in the new century. The sectoral spread of wages was slightly less dramatic, but there was still an unmistakable ladder, with the fuel and energy sector at the top – where workers earned around 2.7 times the 2005 national average – and agriculture at the bottom, paid at a miserly 43 per cent of the average.{44} Pensioners did better than before: in the 1990s, many never received their tiny monthly sums, but now the state not only paid pensions on time, it even increased them. (This accounted for a substantial part of Putin’s support base early on.) But the gender pay gap remained in place in the 2000s, or even grew. Across the economy as a whole, women on average earned between two-thirds and four-fifths of what men did, but the disparity widened the further up the occupational hierarchy you looked: male managers earned one and a half times as much as female ones.{45}
Regional imbalances were not reversed by the 2000s oil boom, either: if anything, the boom exacerbated them, since oil revenues flowed either to Moscow or stayed within the production zones. Parts of the country were being propelled into hypermodernity, while large swathes of it remained mired in deep deprivation. There were huge variations within regions as well as between them. In fact, the places that posted the healthiest-looking average wages tended to be those with the most unequal distribution.{46} Nowhere was this demonstrated more starkly than in Moscow, where an expanding fleet of Mercedes and BMWs whisked the super-rich past struggling pensioners.
The 2000s also brought a new ethnic segmentation of the workforce. Informal labour migration had been a feature of the late Soviet period, drawing workers – mainly men, predominantly from Central Asia or the North Caucasus – to factories, farms and construction sites across the country. This traffic slowed after the breakup of the USSR, when the customary routes were barred by new national borders, but during the economic revival in the new century, it resumed on something like the late Soviet pattern – except that the workers were now ‘foreign’ and also often ‘illegal’, making them much more vulnerable to exploitation. Official data counted 1.7 million labour migrants in 2007, but this didn’t include undocumented workers, who made up the lion’s share of the migrant workforce; according to one estimate, labour migrants all told numbered 7 to 8 million, almost 10 per cent of the working population.{47}
The new arrivals provided a large pool of unskilled labour, toiling on construction sites, cleaning the streets, working in markets or driving taxis for abysmal wages. Xenophobia against them became widespread, from the poisonous ranting of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI) to the casual racism of TV shows like Nasha Rasha, which poked fun at Tajik labourers through two characters called Ravshan and Jamshud. Known as Gastarbeitery – Russians adopted the German word – migrant workers formed a new layer at the base of the social pyramid.{48}
One of the most significant social developments of the 2000s was the expanded role and presence of the state. The state payroll grew from 1.1 million in 2000 to 1.7 million in 2010 – a 50 per cent increase over the course of the decade. The bulk of this growth occurred at the federal level, which accounted for about half of all government employees.{49} Their spatial distribution was cruciaclass="underline" outside the major cities and resource hubs, federal and local government agencies were often the main sources of employment. These functionaries were an important source of support – and of help with electoral rigging – for the regime. But the Putin system drew an even larger portion of its base from among the millions working in state-owned enterprises or in the remnants of the Soviet welfare state. Together with those directly employed in the state apparatus, they formed a category known as biudzhetniki – literally ‘those living off the state budget’, though a less ideologically hostile translation might be ‘public-sector workers’. In some estimates, they amounted to almost a third of the workforce; including their families and dependents, they might even have made up a majority of the population.{50}
The intelligentsia, too, experienced its version of ‘stabilization’ in the 2000s. Strange as it may seem today, they were initially among Putin’s most enthusiastic backers. In late 1999, when Putin was still prime minister, pollster Yuri Levada pointed out that ‘no Russian leader has had such unified support among the educated, professional and artistic classes since Boris Yeltsin in the late 1980s and early 1990s’.{51} Putin’s seriousness and sobriety were at this point considered assets, contrasted with the drunken fumblings of Yeltsin. The assertive, macho persona was also a core part of his appeal, especially to those lured by the idea that a ‘strong hand’ was needed to reel in the anarchy of the 1990s. For some, Putin even promised to fulfil the neoliberal fantasy of a ‘Russian Pinochet’ – the idea being that authoritarianism would somehow guarantee economic growth.[6]
5
Alongside the UK and Switzerland, Cyprus was often the preferred place for wealthy Russians to keep their money, in banks as well as shell companies and trusts. This explains why the island frequently appeared in statistics as the number one source of ‘foreign direct investment’ in Russia.
6
Their willingness to overlook the Pinochet regime’s bloody record was the worst part of this fantasy – a latter-day version of the idea that fascism ‘made the trains run on time’. But it also relied on a total misreading of