Oligarchs and Democrats:
Russians Confront Emerging Inequality
In the industrialized West, most citizens do not see severe contradictions between
democracy and markets: to them, the inequality produced by markets does not conflict with the
egalitarian principles behind democracy. In post-communist Russia, by contrast, many citizens
are less convinced. Recent public opinion research has shown that ordinary Russians are less
than enthusiastic about market structures and are more likely to support democracy than
presents a particular puzzle. Why does the logic that elsewhere convinces democrats that
capitalism is a vital structure in the defense of individual freedom fail to persuade these
Russians? The conventional wisdom is that Russians are insufficiently liberal. Whether as a
result of an overly Byzantine traditional culture or the recent history of Soviet economic
paternalism, the presumption is that Russians are too committed to an egalitarian distribution of
economic goods, too reliant on government as a vehicle to promote the general welfare, and too
ready to sacrifice the freedom of the individual to the collective good to be democrats in the
Western liberal mode.
continued popularity of President Vladimir Putin despite his apparent attacks on personal
freedom, despite in particular his efforts to curb the power of the most successful of Russia’s
entrepreneurs—“oligarchs” like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir
But are Russian democrats really insufficiently liberal? Is their dislike of markets and
oligarchs the product of an alternative set of non-liberal values, or do the sources of discontent
1
For instance, Robert J. Brym, "Re-evaluating Mass Support for Political and Economic Change in
Russia," Europe-Asia Studies 48 (July 1996): 751-766; Arthur H. Miller and William M. Reisinger, and
Vicki L. Hesli, "Understanding Political Change in Post-Soviet Societies: A Further Commentary on Finifer
and Mickiewicz," American Political Science Review 90 (March 1996): 153-166; Grigory I. Vainshstein,
"Obshchestvennoe soznanie i institutsional'nye peremeny," in G. G. Diligenskii, ed., Chelovek v
perekhodnom obshchestve: sotsiologicheskie i sotsial'no-psikhologichekie issledovaniia (Moscow:
Institute of World Economics and International Relations, 1998), p. 35.
2
Judith S. Kullberg and William Zimmerman, "Liberal Elites, Socialist Masses, and Problems of
Democracy," World Politics 51 (April 1999): 323-58; Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the
Creation of Prosperity (New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 40.
3
Cheng Chen and Rudra Sil, "State Legitimacy and the (In)significance of Democracy in Post-Communist
Russia," Paper presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association,
Philadelphia; Ol'ga Kryshtanovskaia, "Vybor patriotov: bednost' ili rakety?," Argumenty i Fakty, no. 30,
July 2003, p. 3.
Convention