ABSTRACT
In Russia, the official and most widely used method of assessing need is the measurement of household income and expenditure, applied within the framework of an absolute concept of poverty. Sociological investigations of the socio-economic position of the Russian population have shown that, apart from current income in cash or in kind, Russian households have 'emergency rations' of various accumulated resources, on which they can draw when trying to survive. Pushing the boundaries between various means of survival, combining and diversifying them, allow many Russian households to avoid a situation where their overall level of material welfare is strictly dependent on their income. Russian sociologists have concluded that relations within informal private networks almost always exist on a mutual basis: although no one calculates the equivalence of such exchanges, equivalence does exist at an invisible level - symbolic rather than economic.
