ABSTRACT
From the beginning of the Russian reforms, the issue of poverty revealed itself as very evident and severe, symbolising the social cost that the population would have to pay in the transition from the Soviet model of welfare to the market. However, it would be untrue to take the view that poverty did not exist in Russia in the Soviet period. In so far as poverty, in the opinion of most researchers, is the inability to maintain an acceptable standard of living, ‘classic’ poor families with a typical set of ‘disadvantaged’ socio-demographic and skills characteristics exist everywhere and at all times. It was simply that, during the Soviet era, ideological considerations meant it was not the done thing to talk about this. A simple analysis shows that if there were two children in a Soviet family and both parents were working in low-paid jobs, then this family could have been considered poor, since the minimum wage was then one-and-a-half times the subsistence minimum, and such low-paid parents could feed only one child without falling into poverty. This situation was usual when there were non-working elderly people in the family, and was especially true when these were former collective farmers (Ovcharova, 2003). According to data from the Independent Institute for Social Policy, something like 16 per cent of families of blue-and white-collar workers in Russia in 1985 had incomes below the subsistence minimum, while among collective farmers (rural dwellers) about 40 per cent were in that situation.
