ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the political values of members of the Russian middle class, and provides a social profile of the participants of five major demonstrations that took place in Moscow over the period December 2011-July 2013. The widely different criteria which have been used to define the middle class have resulted in huge disparities in its estimated size, which is said to vary between 25 percent and 60 percentin the Russian Federation. The state-dependent nature of the Russian middle class has been well documented. In 2013 the public sector accounted for 50 per cent of the Russian economy and, according to the State Statistics Service, employed 25.7 per cent of all economically active citizens. As Sil and Chen stress, 'the association between Russian understandings of democracy and such collective goods as public order, collective welfare and social justice is significantly stronger than that between democracy and competitive elections, formal constitutions or guarantees of individual political rights'.
