ABSTRACT
IN DECEMBER 2011, ‘A VOLCANO OF SOCIAL ACTIVISM THAT had long been dormant started to erupt in Russia’ (Petrov 2012). A tidal wave of mass protest movements swept through the capital and then engulfed scores of Russia’s regions. These demonstrations came as a great shock to the Russian leadership. After decades of the passive acceptance of the status quo it appeared that civil society was at last wakening up, and that it was members of a rising middle class which were at the forefront of the protests against the regime. As Aron observed, ‘No longer burdened with providing for the basic needs of their families and now enjoying perhaps unprecedented, for Russia, personal freedoms and prosperity, the middle class’s more socially active members appear to believe they are entitled to become stakeholders in a functioning, fair, and less corrupt state’ (Aron 2012, p. 4). Compared to advanced capitalist countries in the West where the middle class comprises
between 50% and 60% of the population, in Russia it currently makes up somewhere between 15% and 40% depending on the methodology employed to define and measure it. Realising its role as a catalyst for economic development, in 2008 the Putin regime called for an increase in the size of the middle class ‘to encompass 60 or 70% of Russian society by 2020’ (Remington 2010, p. 22). According to a forecast of the Centre for Strategic Studies, by 2019 the middle class will comprise 45% of the adult Russian population, and in large cities it will make up over 60% (Belanovsky et al. 2012, pp. 75, 82). But have the recent mass demonstrations in Russia really been a revolt of the middle
classes? Do members of the middle class give more support to democratic values than members of other classes? Do the different social and occupational strata within the middle class speak with a single voice? In this study we argue that occupational, demographic and spatial divisions have weakened the class solidarity of the Russian middle class and questioned its role as a catalyst for democratic change. A crucial dividing line here is between those members of the middle class who depend on the state for their livelihood and those who work in the non-state sectors of the economy.
