ABSTRACT

Thinking about poverty has particular significance for Russia as a post-Soviet society. This is because the majority of the population was born during the Soviet period when poverty did not exist and was not recognized as such in the form that it is today. This chapter examines the ways in which Russia has used the new international metrics of poverty designed by the ILO (International Labor Organization) since it first introduced capitalism in 1991. In Russia, it is clear that neoliberal reform results in widespread poverty which, twenty-five years on, can no longer be rationalized as the necessary and short lived pain of transition. Policy makers and scholars who have accepted neoliberalism also accept, perhaps reluctantly, the inevitability of the existence of poverty in Russia. Neoliberal theorists see welfare as dependency on state authority; they treat them as two sides of the same coin.