The Social Question in Russia: From De-Politicization to a Growing Sense of Exploitation

This chapter discusses the trajectory of the social question in post-soviet Russia. Three perspectives are shown: social-economic transformations since the fall of the Soviet regime and the evolution of public discourses on social problems, the subjective and social experience of precariousness and informality, and the place of social grievances in claims directed at the state. It is argued that striking social changes are unfolding now in Russia, in a direction opposite to the atomization and alienation that developed in the 1990s among households impoverished and precaritized by liberal capitalist restructuring. Thirty years after the breakdown of the communist regime, a sense of exploitation is emerging through which the social question is being raised. This means that the social question is not so much show through claims on the state for social care, as it is the social critique of the state as belonging to oligarchs and political and economic elites.