“Four Russias” was created by the geographer Natalya Zubarevich in 2011. She posited the existence four distinct socio-economic blocks: the Westernized urban conglomerates; the mid-sized cities and towns, where most of the population works for the state or a big industrial corporation; the villages, so removed from everything that Vladimir Putin is about as real for them as those guys on Mt. Olympus were for Hellenic shepherds; and the “ethnic republics,” which, for the purposes of this exercise, can be rolled into the two last categories.
The bottom 20% can be described through dry economic data: hand-to-mouth living, no savings at all; still using the outhouse and relying on firewood to keep warm — both 20-25% of the Russian population — really. They are often employed, the “working poor,” living below the poverty line despite having a job. $US150 is considered a decent monthly salary in the low places. Life expectancy and pension age are about the same for Russian males, so it’s a close race between death and a couple years’ retirement.
This is Russia beyond the big cities, in localities like Biysk or Porkhov. It’s all those townlets with a grey-on-grey color scheme and roads like they’ve just been bombed. Born there? Your alcoholic father has quite possibly been beating up your granny for her $US150 pension, and junkies were doing salt in the back of your class in the eighth grade. Collection of scrap metal was an honorable alternative to petty theft, though the metal had to be stolen anyway. Your social circle was all sporting Adidas tracksuits, a third had done jail time. Chances are, you knew someone who killed someone. You sure knew someone who drank themselves to death (maybe it was your dad). And in lieu of the older generation to look up to, you got dames with permed hair, bloated from their cheap macaroni diet, hunched and dead-eyed before they turn forty.
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It's the young men from these low places who comprise a disproportionate percentage of the Russian invading force in Ukraine. Coupled with the simple fact that war breeds atrocity, especially a retro war like this one, is there any wonder that so many Russian soldiers, especially rank-and-file — but also some commanders from the same world — have turned to unspeakable crimes? Unspeakable to you and me, maybe; to them, it was just another Thursday — even in peacetime. The few who somehow picked up the importance of morals in spite of everything bailed out and never looked back. Or are dead. Morals are not conducive to survival in Biysk and Porkhov.
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And then there’s the IKEA crowd — the core of the nation, about 60% by my crude reckoning. This is an important group. The people in the red brick towers are terrified of popular uprising, and everything they do always factors in broad public support, albeit through lies and coercion.
What do they believe? It’s like that joke that the regime in Russia is really “mortgage realism”: Everyone understands everything, but they’ve all got loans to pay.
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We simply don’t appreciate how much this means to middle Russia. The squalor of the bottom 20% remains the default quality of life that the majority of the nation expects. But instead, there came an accumulation of all the small things that, together, spell—or at least promise—a qualitative shift. A smartphone; Lego and a party at a McDonald’s for your kid’s birthday; a car to drive to your own place. This was, in fact, that feeling of stability that Putin keeps talking about.