ABSTRACT
With the collapse of the Soviet system, the Russian government initiated a neo-liberal economic experiment as Utopian as the Bolshevik programme after 1917. No facet of life has remained untouched by the social crisis unleashed by this attempted economic transformation. The decline in Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP) in the 1990s was steeper and deeper than that experienced during the Great Depression in the USA (Connor, 2000:199; Rosefielde, 2001:116); indeed, Russia is said to have endured the ‘deepest and most sustained recession in world history’ during the reform era (Clarke, 1999a:1). This has led to a devastating decline in living standards for the majority of the population. In mid-1998 statistical real wages were a little over half their 1985 level. Moreover, this decline was accompanied by a huge growth in inequality,1 implying the position of poorest had declined even further (ibid.: 120). Unemployment was not as high as was expected, reaching 9.7 per cent in 1996, and rising to a peak of 13.2 per cent in 1998 (Goskomstat, 2003:130). Thereafter it declined, and stood at 8 per cent in 2002 (ibid.).
