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Received: 3 August 2023
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Revised: 8 February 2024
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Accepted: 12 February 2024
DOI: 10.1111/soc4.13196
REVIEW ARTICLE
Inequality and social stratification in Russia
during the Putin regime: From market transition
to war on Ukraine
Theodore P. Gerber
1
|Vladimir Gimpelson
2
1
Department of Sociology, University of
Wisconsin‐Madison, Madison,
Wisconsin, USA
2
IZA Institute of Labor Economics, University
of Wisconsin‐Madison, Bonn, Germany
Correspondence
Theodore P. Gerber, Department of
Sociology, University of Wisconsin‐Madison,
4450 Sewell Social Science Building, 1180
Observatory Drive, Madison, WI
53706, USA.
Email: tgerber@ssc.wisc.edu
Funding information
Carnegie Corporation of New York, Grant/
Award Number: Wisconsin Russia Project
Abstract
The collapse of the USSR in late 1991 inspired social
science research on levels, patterns, and trends in
inequality within Russia, due to theoretical interest in how
market transition affects social stratification. The start of
the Putin regime in 2000 marked a new era in Russia's
post‐Soviet political economic trajectory: in contrast to
the 1990s, the economy first took off, then stagnated,
while the state rolled back institutions of democracy and
civic freedoms. In short, Russia became a consolidated
market economy under authoritarian rule. In this context
research has continued to produce insights into social
stratification. The labor market featured high levels of
employment but with downward wage flexibility, modest
decreases in earnings inequality, and persistent returns to
education, gender wage gaps, and locality‐based differ-
ences. Waves of labor migration to Russia, resurgent
traditional gender norms, shrinking population, housing
inequality, health disparities, and a small contingent of
ultra‐rich represent additional noteworthy developments.
Although market transition is no longer an intriguing
theoretical lens through which to view social stratification
in Russia, the topic nonetheless holds broader theoretical
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs License, which per-
mits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifica-
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© 2024 The Authors. Sociology Compass published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Sociology Compass. 2024;e13196. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/soc4
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https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.13196
interest because inequality became closely intertwined
with Russia's political economy, social policies, and
geopolitical actions, including those that culminated in
Putin's decision to invade Ukraine.
KEYWORDS
gender gap, inequality, market transition, racial/ethnic inequality,
returns to education, Russia, social stratification
1
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INTRODUCTION
The collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 led to rapid and dramatic changes in Russia's economy,
political system, and society. As the Soviet empire unraveled, dismantling the core institutions of the planned
economy, the Russian government of President Boris Yeltsin introduced a series of reforms that replaced
Communist Party rule with electoral democracy and freedom of press, liberalized prices and foreign exchange,
and launched mass privatization of previously state‐owned property. For the rest of the 1990s, Russia was
buffeted by spiraling economic crises, waves of inflation, plunging living standards, and political turmoil. In March
2000 an ailing Yeltsin's chosen successor, Vladimir Putin, was elected President. He has been Russia's head of
state ever since, for nearly a quarter century, even during Dmitri Medvedev's term as president (2008–2012),
when Putin served as Prime Minister and remained in control behind the scenes.
This review examines key trends and patterns in social stratification during the Putin era. We first discuss
labor market inequality, the primary focus of much research by sociologists and economists, along with key
macroeconomic and political developments. We then turn to other major forms of inequality and themes related
to stratification under the Putin regime. We conclude by suggesting how research on social stratification in
contemporary Russia can be extended by making the case that inequality may have influenced both Putin's
decision to launch a full‐scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and how the war has played out within
Russia.
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THE LABOR MARKET
2.1
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Background: The 1990s
Social stratification and labor market inequality in Russia attracted attention from sociologists and economists
during the 1990s mainly due to theoretical interest in how the transition from a planned economy to a system
based on private ownership and markets affects the extent and structure of inequality. In sociology, this issue was
initially motivated by the “market transition” debate over whether market reforms in China increased returns to
education and decreased the rewards of political position (e.g. Nee, 1996; Walder, 2002; Wu & Xie, 2003). Empirical
studies found little support for either proposition in Russia during the 1990s (Gerber, 2000,2002; Gerber &
Hout, 1998). In fact, Russia diverged from a textbook market economy, instead developing “crony capitalism”
(Aslund, 2019), where a handful of elites used political connections to amass fortunes by acquiring the lion's share
of formerly state‐owned productive assets while most of the population's living standards were eroded by falling
earnings, surging inflation, shrinking employment in heavy industries (favored by Soviet‐era planners but under-
mined by foreign competition), and eroding social welfare payments.
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The Russian government sought to maintain nominal employment levels to avoid a cataclysm as the economy
reeled from massive structural dislocations, currency collapses, capital flight, regional secessions, disunity, political
conflicts, corruption, and widespread uncertainty. Although unemployment grew in the early years of the transition
relative to a low 1992 baseline of roughly 5% (Figure 1), it began receding not long after briefly reaching double
digits. Macroeconomic adjustment occurred through falling labor incomes, not mass unemployment. Phenomena
such as rampant wage arrears (Earle & Sabirianova, 2002; Gerber, 2006), reduced work hours (Lehmann &
Wadsworth, 2007), liquidity crises and barter (Woodruff, 2000), the erosion of the welfare system (Cook, 2011),
the persistence of economically irrational industrial “mono‐towns” (Crowley, 2016), and the growing economic
impact of organized criminal groups and corrupt officials proved salient aspects of the economy that were at least
as influential on the labor market as market reforms as such. Poverty and earnings inequality increased, and wealth
became concentrated in the hands of so‐called “oligarchs” whose connections with officials enabled them to obtain
vast holdings at cut‐rate prices. Russia's GDP shrank by about one third from 1991 to 1999, and real wages
declined by about two thirds in the same period. Population health issues and mortality surged, while fertility fell,
initiating a new cycle of demographic decline that persists through today (Eberstadt, 2011).
2.2
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The Putin era
Putin came to power just as Russia's economy began a fundamentally different dynamic. Dramatic economic growth
and improved living standards in the 2000s eventually gave way to slower growth and stagnation in the 2010s and
2020. But there would be no return to the sharp economic deterioration of the 1990s. Initially, Putin's regime
rationalized the tax and labor codes, while improving tax collection and also loosening various regulations. It then
gradually but steadfastly boosted the government's economic resources and role by ensuring that the most
FIGURE 1 Trends in main economic and labor market indicators, 1991–2022.
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lucrative assets in the country were controlled by regime loyalists and controlling revenues from newly lucrative oil
and natural gas exports. It also set about slowly but surely rolling back civic freedoms, the independent press, and
democratic reforms (e.g. by converting regional governorships from elected to appointed positions in 2004),
guaranteeing favorable election outcomes via informational manipulation and fraud, repressing opposition forces,
and ramping up geo‐political tensions for the purpose of making national security and the restoration of Russia's
great power status, rather than economic growth, the primary basis for domestic political legitimacy. Throughout,
to avoid provoking social unrest it continued to selectively temper neoliberal welfare policies with elements of
populism, corporatism and enhanced state involvement (Cook, 2011; Matveev & Novkunskaya, 2022), producing a
social welfare system “neither purely statist nor neo‐liberal” (Kulmala et al., 2014). Especially in periods leading up
to elections, the regime bolstered payments to core constituencies such as the elderly and employees of state
bureaucracies in order to secure their loyal support (Sokhey, 2020).
The contrast of economic improvements during the 2000s with the turmoil of the 1990s lent Putin initial
popularity, helping him get easily re‐elected in 2004 and remain in power through presidential elections in 2008
(when Medvedev had to run in his place because of term limits at the time), 2012, and 2018, despite facing
challenges such as the global economic crisis of 2008, international sanctions following Russia's annexation of
Crimea and military intervention to support violent secessionists in eastern Ukraine in 2014, and the rise of an
organized opposition movement led by Aleksei Navalny. With each successive election, manipulation of results
played a greater role. Although the COVID19 pandemic hit Russia especially hard, Putin pushed through consti-
tutional reforms in 2020 that concentrated power fully in the presidency and will allow him to remain in that
position through 2036. As of this writing, he has weathered the economic and geo‐political fallout from Russia's
full‐scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
With Russia's transition to a market economy no longer in doubt by the early 2000s, during the Putin era social
science interest in its labor market processes has receded. Russia's evolving domestic politics and foreign policies
became the overriding focus of research and commentary on the country, with topics such as election manipulation,
the regime's consolidation of power and suppression of its opponents, the inner workings of the regime's system of
rule, inter‐relationships of political and economic dynamics at federal and regional levels, and growing tensions
between Russia and the United States receiving far more attention than social and economic inequality. However, a
modest but steady stream of studies have examined key patterns and trends in macroeconomic performance and
labor market stratification during the Putin era.
2.3
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Key macroeconomic trends
If 1991–1999 was a period of sustained economic crisis, disruption, uncertainty, and plummeting living standards,
the Putin era can be divided into two sub‐periods marked by distinct macroeconomic developments
(Gimpelson, 2019). The first, from 2000 to 2008, saw impressive growth: real GDP increased by 66% and real
wages rose by 185% (Figure 1). This juggernaut resulted mainly from improvements in the government's financial
situation due to windfall revenues from oil and natural gas exports, as global hydrocarbon prices surged. The
rationalization of regulations and the tax code, a weaker ruble, the consolidation of market reforms, expanded
international trade, and relative political stability also contributed.
The 2008 global financial crisis affected Russia, launching a second sub‐period marked by stagnation. Although
growth resumed in 2010–2013, soon the regime turned away from integration with the global economy and
economic growth as goals, prioritizing instead the protection of Russian economic sovereignty, modernization and
enhancement of the military, and maintenance of social and political stability over growth. Chastened by protests
against rationalizing reforms such as the monetization of various state benefits in 2005 (Wengle & Rasell, 2008)
and increasing the retirement age in 2018 (Logvinenko, 2020), it shied away from economically necessary measures
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that might spark social unrest. Large and growing proportions of the labor force work for state organizations in
government, health care, education, and heavy industry.
Persistent corruption and weak protections of property rights discourage investment and entrepreneurship.
International sanctions imposed on Russia in 2014 due to its actions in Ukraine furthered the prioritizing of
securitization and state power over growth. These policy goals, along with global economic trends, produced fitful
growth, with occasional setbacks. During 2009–2020 Russian GDP increased at an annualized rate of less than 1%
(about 10% over the period) and real wages by less than 2.5% annually. However, most of this growth was just post‐
crisis recovery and almost stopped by 2013. Simply put, Russia's economy has stagnated since 2009. Covid brought
another recession in 2020, and the brief recovery was then reversed by the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
2.4
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Overall income inequality
Different estimates of trends in earnings inequality during the Putin era have emerged. For simplicity, we focus on
the dynamics of the Gini coefficient for individual incomes. Russia's state statistical agency (Rosstat) and the World
Bank (WB) report two different trajectories (Figure 1). Both sets of estimates agree on the basic trend: earnings
inequality rose during the growth period of the 2000s, peaked in about 2007, and then declined subsequently
during the period of stagnation. Compared to the Rosstat estimates, those of the WB tend to be lower, exhibit more
volatility, and decline more sharply in the 2010s. The two trends diverge mainly for methodological reasons. The
Rosstat measure is based on parametric model calibrated with data from different sources, and it is biased toward
status‐quo values (Yemtsov, 2008). The WB estimates are based on direct calculations from microdata and are
more sensitive to annual shocks. The positive association across the two periods between economic growth, income
and wage inequality suggests higher growth may be linked to increased wage inequality.
A series of detailed studies of income inequality dynamics have relied on a single data source, the publicly‐
available Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey of the Higher School of Economics (RLMS), a dwelling‐based
prospective panel known for its high data quality (see https://rlms‐hse.cpc.unc.edu/). Dang et al. (2020) confirm
the decline in wage inequality after 2008, which they attribute to more rapid income growth for the lowest than the
highest earners. However, like other published papers using the RLMS, they also find that annual Gini coefficients
declined in the 2000s, in contrast to the increase during that period evident in the Rosstat and WB estimates.
Others also report disproportionate income growth among the lowest earners from 2000 to 2005 using the same
data source, citing various explanations: improved income stability and hours worked (Gorodnichenko et al., 2010),
wage increases in the lower part of the distribution (Lukyanova & Oshchepkov, 2012), declining informal work
(Lukyanova, 2015), and structural changes such as declining employment shares of the least (agriculture,
manufacturing and public sector) and most (high tech and extraction) lucrative industries (Calvo et al., 2015;
Gimpelson, 2019).
The aforementioned estimates may systematically understate wage inequality by omitting observations at both
extremes of the wage distribution, which are difficult to capture with surveys. Novokmet et al. (2018) address the
underrepresentation of top earners by supplementing survey data with fiscal data based on selectively available tax
reporting information. They conclude that Putin‐era Russia is among the world leaders in income inequality, with
Gini values 15–20 points higher than those reported above. However, their procedure has been criticized for
lacking transparency and requiring very strong assumptions (Kapeliushnikov, 2020).
These disagreements over the general level and (for 2000–2008) trend in income inequality in Russia suggest
that more research is still needed, hopefully employing a wider range of data sources, exploring different options
for addressing the problem of missing top earners, and formally testing alternative explanations for the declining
earnings inequality. Yet, available various estimates all agree that, after surging in the 1990s in the aftermath of
market reforms, income inequality has waned substantially in Russia during the last 15–20 years, a trend not widely
noted outside of articles by economists who specialize in the study of this topic.
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2.5
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Institutional drivers of labor market inequality
In contrast to 1990s, when Russia underwent a massive transformation from a planned to a market economy,
during the Putin era a more stable set of market economy institutions has prevailed. Russia's labor market is
characterized by considerable employment and wage flexibility: though mass firings remain prohibitively costly for
employers, individual dismissals and forced quits place few formal burdens on employers (largely because pro-
tections are enforced unevenly), both minimum wage rates and non‐employment benefits are low, and income taxes
are flat. One specific source of wage flexibility is the unusual structure of most labor contracts in Russia: typically,
contracts specify a minimal baseline income, often supplemented with bonus payments (which can be negotiated
informally) when conditions allow. During macroeconomic contractions, employers can easily reduce wage pay-
ments to the contracted minima, while retaining the flexibility to incentivize employees with bonuses in better
times. In the middle of the Putin era, the variable (non‐contracted) component averaged one third of overall
earnings (ranging from 0% to 90%) and its Gini was 0.63, versus 0.41 for the fixed (contracted) component
(Gimpelson, 2016).
These tendencies, along with slow technological innovation and persistently low labor productivity, foster
widespread low‐wage employment (because low unemployment benefits decrease reservation wages and fuel the
informal sector), while avoiding high unemployment rates. This has been a clear policy choice (Gimpelson, 2019),
not an intrinsic feature of market transition: other transition countries in Central and Eastern Europe have had
higher non‐employment benefits and minimum wage levels, resulting in less wage inequality but higher unem-
ployment (Boeri & Terrell, 2002). Labor unions have also been exceptionally weak in Russia, perhaps reflecting their
role in the Soviet economy as “transmission belts” for Communist Party policies and certain benefits rather than
as representatives of workers' interests, as well as the political influence of organizations of industrialists
(Crowley, 2021; Grigoriev & Dekalchuk, 2017).
2.6
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Stratification in the labor market
We turn now to key patterns and trends in the structuring of inequality by variables such as education, experience,
gender, and ethnicity/nativity. Returns to education have received the most attention due to general theoretical
interest in whether human capital is better rewarded by market institutions than by Soviet‐style planning. Research
on the initial market transition years reached divergent findings: Brainerd (1998) found that returns to education
did, indeed, increase, while others found no such evidence (Cheidvasser and Benitez‐Silva, 2007; Gerber &
Hout, 1998). Subsequently, most research on the issue has used the RLMS. Based on this single data set, several
studies conclude that returns to education did increase from the early 1990s through the early 2000s, peaked at
roughly 10% per year of education, and then began to retreated to about 8% (Belskaya et al., 2014; Calvo
et al., 2015; Gimpelson, 2019; Melianova et al., 2021). Similar patterns apply to alternative measures, such as the
returns to a university degree (which tend to be higher than returns lower in the education distribution). Women
and private sector employees have higher returns to education than men and public sector workers. Relatedly, the
top two job quality quintiles (measured by earnings or education) expanded disproportionately during the 2000–
2009 period of rapid growth without the corresponding expansion of low‐quality jobs associated with job polari-
zation (often attributed to technological change) in Western economies, but this job upgrading trend petered out as
the economy stagnated after 2009 (Gimpelson & Kapeliushnikov, 2023).
In comparative terms, returns to education in Russia reached approximately mean levels for OECD countries.
However, it should be kept in mind that returns to education reflect the relative valuations of both skilled and
unskilled labor. Thus, the highest returns have been typical for the least developed Russian regions, because of the
especially low wages of those with least education. Russia has had consistently high and increasing rates of college
completion, which is hard to explain if returns to education have been decreasing (Melianova et al., 2021). Also, all
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of the studies are based on the RLMS data, whose longitudinal design and highly clustered sample make it less than
ideal for assessing changes in returns to education over time. A recent article employing other data sources finds
that the returns to education are significantly underestimated by the RLMS and have been stably in the range of
12%–13% from the mid‐2000s through the end of the 2010s (Kapeliushnikov, 2021).
Russia has evinced an unconventional pattern in terms of the income returns to work experience. The wage‐
experience profile is relatively flat, peaks early, and then declines steeply (Chernina & Gimpelson, 2023). This
suggests that workers at the end of their working life earn as much as workers in entry level jobs do, while the gap
with middle career jobs is relatively small, contradicting theoretical expectations as well as documented empirical
evidence for other countries (Lagakos et al., 2018). However, Chernina and Gimpelson (2023) show, based on an
age‐period‐cohort decomposition, that the odd pattern reflects the overlay of two effects that offset each other:
accumulation of experience over the working life brings monetary gains and produces the standard concave form,
but belonging to the Soviet‐era cohorts is associated with reduced wages. This interaction of experience and cohort
is obfuscated in analyses that only consider cross‐sectional age/experience gradients.
Gender inequality in Russia's labor market was another major area of study during the first decade of Russia's
post‐Soviet transition (e.g. Gerber & Mayorova, 2006; Newell & Reilly, 2001; Ogloblin, 1999; Semykina &
Linz, 2007). In Russia, as in most developed countries, women have exceeded men in average educational attain-
ment for decades, yet men have consistently earned more than women. Russia had one of the highest rates of
female employment in the world during Soviet times, a trait which persists to this day. The gender gap in mean
monthly wages was around 35% during the 1990s, and then declined to around 30% in the 2000s, a level at which it
has remained (Oshchepkov, 2021). Sex segregation by occupation and industry accounts for 20%–35% of this large
(compared to OECD countries) gender pay gap, according to Oshchepkov's (2021) decomposition analysis using
waves of the RLMS data from 2004 to 2018; differences in hours work explain only about 6%–10%, while human
capital reduces the gap. Most of the gender wage gap remains unexplained, and could reflect gender discrimination
by employers.
According to the 2010 Russian Census, about 20% of Russian society consists of non‐ethnic Russians. Thus, it is
surprising that there is little research on ethnic or racial differentials in earnings. An important exception is an audit
study by Bessudnov and Shcherbak (2020), who submitted over 9000 job applications that varied only by the ethnic
identity implied by the applicant names for openings in four Russian cities. They found that employers discriminate
against non‐European more than European minorities, and also that there was greater discrimination in Moscow
and St. Petersburg than in two more ethnically diverse cities, both of which are in regions where Soviet‐era policies
explicitly promoted non‐ethnic Russians.
Given Russia's enormous size and regional heterogeneity, it is unsurprising that geographic differences in
earnings and, correspondingly, standards of living, are especially pronounced in Russia. Both variations across
regional units and urban/rural differences have been analyzed. Zubarevich (2013,2016) offers a comprehensive
and influential framework, according to which localities are sorted hierarchically into four “Russias” with distinctive
economic, social, and political profiles: (1) Major urban centers (Moscow, St. Petersburg and especially large and
prosperous regional capitals such as Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk) are characterized by a large fraction of post‐
industrial employment, high levels of education, relatively dynamic economic development, small business activity,
and global connectedness, and relatively large shares of middle class residents in their populations. Moscow is
especially distinctive in these domains. They are home to 20%–30% of Russia's population. (2) Medium‐large cities
feature high levels of employment in low‐and medium technology manufacturing and extractive industries, reliance
on state subsidies, and conservative political values supportive of the Putin regime rooted in perceptions that
things were better in Soviet times (in contrast to the somewhat more oppositional tendencies of at least some
major urban centers). Earnings are relatively high in cities of this type located in regions with extractive industries,
but low in those with high concentrations of manufacturing enterprises. About 30% of the population resides in
such localities, but their populations are shrinking because young people seek to leave them for major urban
centers. (3) Rural villages and small towns (under 20,000 residents) are economically depressed, heavily reliant on
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state subsidies, and have low living standards, aging and poorly educated populations that mainly work in agri-
culture and related industries (like food processing). Their residents are politically disengaged and tend to blindly
support the incumbent authorities. (4) The regions of the North Caucasus and southern Siberia, where about 6% of
the population lives, constitute another peripheral group with a poor economic base, very low levels of economic
development, large ethnic minority populations that are often in conflict, high birth rates, traditionalist and pa-
triarchal values, and clan‐based politics.
Oshchepkov (2015) finds evidence that wage differentials across regions compensate for differentials in
economic and other non‐wage amenities. Lehmann et al. (2023) demonstrate a convergence from 1996 to 2017 in
regional GDPs of approximately 2% per year, reflecting higher growth rates in poorer regions driven by inter‐
regional migration more than by human capital. However, this study is based on official regional GDP statistics.
Li and Li (2022) suggest the data may not be reliable; they use the brightness of nighttime lights as a proxy measure
of regional economic performance and find that international sanctions in 2014 tended to reduce economic per-
formances and increase regional disparities, though these effects diminished over time.
3
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IMMIGRATION, ETHNO‐RACIAL INEQUALITY, GENDER, AND OTHER ASPECTS
OF STRATIFICATION
Although the labor market has received most attention, researchers have studied other aspects of social stratifi-
cation in Putin‐era Russia. These include major bodies of research on the unequal treatment of immigrants and (to a
lesser extent) native‐born ethnic minorities and on gender relations within families and in politics. In addition, there
is work on demographic sources of inequality, housing inequality, disparities in social status and health, and wealthy
elites.
3.1
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Immigration and ethno‐racial inequality
During the Putin era Russia became one of the top 2–4 countries in the world in terms of annual stocks of im-
migrants, as labor migrants flocked into the country from Ukraine and other former Soviet republics of Central Asia
and the South Caucasus (for an overview, see Zaloznaya & Gerber, 2021). Although Russia's population and its
leaders have expressed the type of anti‐immigrant sentiments observed in many countries, Russia's economy has
needed the cheap labor provided by immigrants and migrant and remittance flows have enhanced Russia's geo‐
political sway over former Soviet states on its southern borders.
A number of qualitative studies have emphasized harsh and exploitative treatment of immigrants—particularly
non‐Europeans—by employers, police, teachers, and government officials (Demintseva, 2020b; Kuznetsova &
Round, 2019; Nikiforova & Brednikova, 2018; Reeves, 2013,2015). Others emphasize variations in immigrant
experience within Russia and the strategies and resources that immigrants deploy to deal with the challenges they
face (Demintseva, 2020a; Gerber & Zavisca, 2020; Kornienko et al., 2018; Turaeva, 2018,2020).
Quantitative work demonstrates the prevalence in the ethnic Russian population of negative attitudes toward
non‐European immigrants (Bessudnov, 2016; Gorodzeisky, 2019; Gorodzeisky & Glikman, 2017; Gorodzeisky
et al., 2015). A survey of immigrant women from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan in three Russian cities that
features a subsample of native‐born ethnic Russian women demonstrates higher levels of harassment and work-
place disadvantages among the immigrants, with some variations by legal status, country of origin, and other factors
(Agadjanian et al., 2017; Gorina et al., 2018).
However, in contrast to the burgeoning literature on the experiences of immigrants, especially from non‐
European countries and backgrounds, there has been relatively little research on the relative economic and so-
cial position of native‐born ethnic minorities. Survey based studies demonstrate that many ethnic Russians have
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negative views of non‐ethnic Russians, particularly of Asian origin (Chapman et al., 2018; Gerber & He, 2021;
Herrera & Butkovich Kraus, 2016). But the potential manifestations of such ethnic and racial prejudices in
systematic social, economic, and political disadvantages have been under‐researched (Yusupova, 2023;
Zakharov, 2015). The emerging literature on immigrants will hopefully point the way to more work on ethnic and
racial cleavages among native‐born citizens of Russia, particularly as race and ethnicity intersect with regional and
class differences in such a way as to produce the types of multi‐layered disadvantages in death rates of Russian
soldiers in the Ukraine war demonstrated in an innovative recent study by Bessudnov (2023).
3.2
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Gender inequality in families and politics
The post‐Soviet era has seen the retrenchment of traditional gender norms in Russia (Zaloznaya & Gerber, 2021),
which affect power and status differentials not only in workplaces, but within families and in politics. Ethnographic
and interview‐based studies have probed aspects of gender relations that are hard to study quantitatively. Mor-
ris (2016) and Walker (2018,2022) portray how working class Russian men embrace notions of traditional mas-
culinity associated with the breadwinner role, observing how blocked access to breadwinner status through manual
employment due to market reforms is a source of seething frustration. Utrata (2015,2019) shows how Russian men
and women coproduce hegemonic masculinity through bargaining and compromise within intimate relationships,
reinforcing typical patterns of male parental irresponsibility and destructive alcoholism.
In a mixed methods study involving longitudinal in‐depth interviews and the RLMS, Ashwin et al. (2021)
demonstrate that elderly men and women who continue to work after reaching retirement age—which is common
due to Russian pension policies (Gerber & Radl, 2014)—both derive satisfaction from their employment, but for
different reasons: men value the income, while women appreciate more the social interactions and sense of purpose
that work offers. Ashwin and Isupova (2014,2018) highlight the persistence of the male‐breadwinner concept within
Russian married couples, which they see as a fundamental source of the male marriage premium on the labor market
and resurgent gender traditionalism. Ibragimova & Guseva (2017) show men control household finances among
younger, economically successful Russian couples, reflecting a growing influence of conservative gender ideology.
Resurgent norms of hyper‐masculinity within Russian society are also reflected in the political realm. Putin's
projection of machismo, linked with an aggressive nationalistic posture in geo‐politics, has been an important
source of his popularity (Johnson, 2016; Makarychev & Medvedev, 2015; Riabov & Riabova, 2014; Sperling, 2014,
2016), especially as the economic boom of the 2000s receded. Government media messaging has explicitly linked
military aggression toward Ukraine with the “re‐masculinization” of Russia (Voronova, 2017). Conventional, even
toxic masculinity is not only popular in the abstract in Putin‐era Russia, it has legislative teeth: in the last decade
new laws have weakened protections against gender‐based discrimination in the labor market, decriminalized
domestic violence, and effectively outlawed overt homosexuality (Johnson, 2017; Kondakov, 2014; Temkina &
Zdravomyslova, 2014), and pro‐natalist policies emphasize women's role as bearers of children (Borozdina
et al., 2016). Such measures serve to reinforce women's subordinate position in Russian society. But, like the role of
hyper‐masculinity in explaining Putin's persistent popularity, they suggest that traditional norms resonate with
Russian society in the Putin era.
3.3
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Other related topics: Demography, housing, health disparities, and wealth
Although the complex relationships between demographic change and inequality in Russia have been relatively
unexplored, we note three themes in the literature. First, changing population composition by age, sex, and edu-
cation contributes fairly little to trends in earnings inequality (Calvo et al., 2015). Second, relative cohort sizes,
which reflect both earlier fertility trends, such as the plunge in births during World War II (Yastrebov, 2021) and
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persistent post‐Soviet declines in completed cohort fertility despite a raft of pro‐natalist policies introduced by the
Putin regime (Zakharov, 2024), do affect Russia's overall economic performance. About one third of GDP Russia's
GDP growth from 1997 to 2018 resulted from a demographic dividend from the entry of relatively large and
well‐educated cohorts into the workforce; however, entering cohorts are now already much smaller and declining,
which will likely retard growth and inflate the age dependency ratio for the next three decades (Gimpelson &
Kapeliushnikov, 2018; World Bank, 2016). Russian war losses will only exacerbate the problem of a declining
workforce. But labor shortages could induce disproportionate wage growth for less skilled workers, perhaps ulti-
mately reducing wage inequality. Third, female‐headed households have had lower incomes and higher exposure to
poverty than male‐headed households since the early 2000s, net of other variables (Denisova, 2012; Hlasny, 2022).
Such households have become more prevalent since the collapse of the Soviet Union due to increased non‐marital
childbearing (Perelli‐Harris & Gerber, 2011) and more frequent divorce (Churilova & Zakharov, 2021), leading
Utrata (2015) to conclude that single motherhood has practically become a new norm.
After the demise of the Soviet Union, Russia and other former Soviet republics privatized the vast majority of
state‐owned housing stock by transferring ownership to officially registered residents. Because most apartments
were state‐owned in Soviet times, this quickly made Russia one of the leading countries in the world in the rate of
homeownership (Zavisca, 2012). However, low incomes coupled with limited access to mortgages (and consumer
credit in general) have hampered the subsequent development of Russia's housing market (Wang & Gerber, 2022).
This has made the acquisition of new homes financially out‐of‐reach for most Russians who are not already
homeowners and thus forced many young adults to reside with parents or in‐laws and wait to acquire property
rights to housing through inheritance. As a result, variables associated with high income such as university edu-
cation and elite occupational status predict entry to homeownership via purchase, but not via the more common
pathway (inter‐familial transfer), which depends more on the longevity of parents (Gerber et al., 2022). Also, more
educated Russians have better‐quality housing and are more satisfied with their housing than their less educated
counterparts (Zavisca et al., 2021).
The economic turbulence of the 1990s makes Russia an interesting case for the study of how factors such as
education relate to non‐economic domains such as social status and health. Sokolov (2019) shows that participation
in high culture activities remained an important marker of social status in Russia from 1991 to 2017 even though it
was de‐coupled from economic standing. He interprets this as evidence of the persistence of a social status order
that is independent from the economic class hierarchy. Education and class differentials in both mortality
(Bessudnov et al., 2012; Shkolnikov et al., 2022) and other health outcomes (Cockerham, 2007; Glei et al., 2013)
have been large but stable in Russia in the last several decades.
Quantitative research on trends in wealth inequality is hampered by lack of access to reliable data, though
Novokmet et al. (2018) use a combination of disparate data sources to conclude that offshore wealth holdings of
Russians in the Putin era are three times larger than the country's foreign currency reserves and equal in
magnitude to domestically held wealth. They also cite Russia's large number of billionaires listed in Forbes magazine
(averaging around 100) as evidence of exceptionally high wealth inequality in Russia. Schimpfossl (2018) provides a
fascinating account of the outlook and values of the extremely wealthy Russians based on 80 interviews she
conducted with billionaires and multimillionaires. She finds they are strong advocates of evolutionary and genetic
theories that justify their riches as merit‐based and feel that they deserve to have greater political influence and
international approval than they do.
4
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CONCLUSION: INEQUALITY, SOCIAL POLICY, (GEO)‐POLITICS, AND WAR
As this review has shown, research on inequality in Putin era Russia has covered a wide range of topics and
produced a substantial set of findings. We have called for more research on ethnic and racial disparities in the labor
market and other realms. To this we would add the need for research on the disparate impact of the COVID19
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pandemic on different subpopulations of Russians (Walker, 2023). Gimpelson (2022) shows that anti‐COVID
measures (firm closures and the transition to remote work) adopted in 2020 had a negative impact on wages
for workers whose activities could not be conducted remotely (e.g. construction and transportation) and who are in
the middle quintiles of the wage distribution, but only for a brief period in 2020. But more work is needed on
possible disparities in COVID‐related deaths and other potential longer‐term economic impacts. The broad liter-
ature would also benefit from greater cross‐referencing of qualitative and quantitative approaches: works in each
methodological tradition often ignore work in the other, a tendency not unique to studies of Russia.
More broadly, empirical studies of social stratification might fruitfully expand their theoretical scope by
exploring more systematically how patterns and trends in inequality within Russia relate to domestic and global
political economy. Although Russia's market transition provided something of a general theoretical framework for
research on inequality in the 1990s, the consolidation of a politically authoritarian market economy under Putin has
rendered that framework obsolete. Stratification researchers can bring to the table understanding of complex social
and economic cleavages in Russian society that, as in all societies, have potential effects in such domains as eco-
nomic growth, technological innovation, entrepreneurship, demographic change, cultural production, health, social
policy, politics, and geo‐politics. We conclude by briefly suggesting one specific direction for this type of expanded
application of findings regarding inequality.
Observers of Putin‐era Russia often characterize state‐society relations in terms of a “social contract,”
whereby the regime commits to providing social stability and gradual improvements in living standards to the
population in return for its political quiescence (Greene, 2014; Logvinenko, 2020; Sokhey, 2020; Vinogradova
et al., 2015), while ensuring economic elites that they can preserve their fortunes in exchange for loyalty to Putin. It
was easier to purchase this quiescence during the economic boom of the 2000s than during the subsequent
stagnation. Social welfare policy during the period has reflected contradictory impulses of, on the one hand, a long‐
term trend toward devolving more responsibility for social protection to households and individuals and, on the
other, selective enhancements of state interventions designed to avoid economically‐motivated unrest
(Crowley, 2021; Matveev & Novkunskaya, 2022). The tension between efficiency‐oriented reforms (such as
investing in human capital and technological development, ending subsidies for inefficient enterprises, stimulating
competition and entrepreneurship, streamlining regulations, optimizing various welfare benefits) needed to yield
higher growth in the long run and the politically fraught, short‐term negative impacts that implementing them will
have on certain groups in the shorter run have kept economic policy and welfare policy in a limbo that becomes all
the more difficult to sustain over time, especially in unfavorable global economic and geo‐political conditions.
Inequality, in other words, continually poses a threat to political stability, and the actions the Russian state has
taken to defuse the risk have thwarted the country's growth rates, rendering the actions themselves harder to
sustain.
The corresponding dynamic, in turn, may well help explain why the Putin regime turned increasingly toward
identity‐based legitimation focused on nationalist posturing and conflict with “the West” during the 2010s and,
more recently, entirely abandoned economic prosperity in favor of military aggression and expansionist foreign
policy as the primary mission of the Russian government. Deflecting public attention away from economic to
identity issues and geo‐politics likely seemed a viable strategy to cope with the sharpening horns of the growth
versus stability dilemma. The appeal of such as strategy was probably enhanced by the resurgence in society of
hyper‐masculinity (which allowed Putin to harness machismo to the projection of geo‐political power and to deploy
arguments about the superiority of Russia's “traditional” values compared to the feminism and sexual and gender
diversity of the West), latent ethnic Russian chauvinism (which also enhanced the popular appeal of nationalist
chest‐thumping), and mass immigration from Central Asia (which fueled ethnic chauvinism while cementing Russia's
influence over remittance‐dependent origin countries). However, heightened tensions with the West have also
exacerbated Russia's economic stagnation, lending greater urgency over time to the need for an alternative basis
for regime legitimacy, motivating ever more extreme acts of aggression in foreign affairs, eventually reaching the
point of a wholly unprovoked full‐scale invasion of Ukraine.
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In sum, the particular trends and forms in social inequality that characterize the Putin era are both product and
source of an adverse dynamic: Putin increasingly turned away from domestic economic improvements to extreme
nationalism and confrontational geo‐politics as the main justification for his rule and, in so doing, further diminished
the financial resources at hand to continue providing economic security and stability (due to sanctions and
COVID19 among other things), thus exacerbating the perceived need for more repressive domestic measures and
more aggressive, expansionist foreign policies. The war itself only intensifies the economic pressures on the regime
by reducing growth even more and pushing Russia's economy in reverse with its perverse innovation of “techno-
logically backward import substitution” (Milanovic, 2022).
We cannot, of course, prove this hypothesis, but its logic is compelling. An appreciation of just how significant
systematic inequalities in incomes and living standards, and social cleavages along the lines of class, gender,
ethnicity, and nativity have been in Russia, and of how they have constrained Russia's economic growth and social
welfare policies while encouraging extreme nationalism and great power posturing as sources of political legiti-
macy, might thus inform explanations of the genesis of the war. Finally, as Bessudnov (2023) shows, the social and
economic repercussions of the war have been unevenly experienced within Russia, a trend which could well pro-
duce divisions in public support for Putin's regime.
In sum, even without the unifying paradigm of market transition theory, social inequality in Russia does not
exist in a vacuum as topic of purely abstract interest to sociologists and economists. It is both an outcome of and a
constraining element in Russia's political economy, social policy, and geo‐politics. Sadly, the Putin regime's domestic
crackdowns since the start of its war on Ukraine rapidly accelerate a long‐term trend toward the destruction of
academic freedom (Zavadskaya & Gerber, 2023). This casts significant doubts on the very possibility of carrying out
the empirical social science research on social inequality necessary to further develop the strands of literature we
have reviewed here without significant innovations in data collection methodologies. Therefore, it may be a good
time to focus on consolidating analyses based on existing data, as well as expanding the theoretical scope of studies
of social stratification to explore more thoroughly potential interconnections of inequality with political economy,
social policy, and geo‐politics.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors thank an anonymous reviewer for helpful suggestions and the Wisconsin Russia Project (funded by
Carnegie Corporation of New York and the US‐Russia Foundation), which supported the writing of this article.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
No original data analysis has been conducted for this review article.
ETHICS STATEMENT
None necessary because there are no human subjects in the research for this paper.
ORCID
Theodore P. Gerber https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8899-6815
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
Theodore P. Gerber is Conway‐Bascom Professor of Sociology and Director of the Wisconsin Russia Project at
the University of Wisconsin‐Madison. His research analyses social stratification, demographic change, migra-
tion processes, housing, entrepreneurship, political behavior, collective memory, and public opinion and related
topics in Russia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and other former Soviet countries.
Vladimir Gimpelson is Professor of Practice at the University of Wisconsin‐Madison and Research Fellow at
the IZA Institute of Labor Economics (Bonn). He previously directed the Center for Labor Market Studies at the
Higher School of Economics (Moscow). His research examines labor market issues in Russia and other post‐
socialist economies.
How to cite this article: Gerber, T. P., & Gimpelson, V. (2024). Inequality and social stratification in Russia
during the Putin regime: From market transition to war on Ukraine. Sociology Compass, e13196. https://doi.
org/10.1111/soc4.13196
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