At the bottom was the mass of society—the disprivileged and dispossessed. About half of this underclass consisted of the ‘working poor’, those whose disposable income plunged by two-thirds in the 1990s and, for most of them, was unpaid and in arrears. The working poor included most civil servants and state employees (for example, teachers and doctors) as well as those trapped in unprofitable or mismanaged enterprises. It helped little when the employers offered to ‘pay’ the wages in kind, such as gas pistols, coffins, and brassieres; teachers in Altai were first offered toilet paper, then funeral accessories, and finally vodka to settle their wage arrears. The other half of this underclass found itself below the poverty line (that is, had an income beneath the subsistence minimum). They included the unemployed (a category unknown in Soviet times, but—by conservative calculations—reaching 14 per cent of the workforce in 1999), the elderly (whose pensions were devalued by hyperinflation), single-parent families, and an array of social outcasts—the homeless, waifs, the disabled, and refugees from the Caucasus and other areas of conflict. Although estimates vary, in 1999 the CIA estimated that 40 per cent of the Russian population—over fifty million people—were below the poverty line (compared to 12 per cent in the United States). Although official figures can overstate the scale of the problem (since they do not take into account tax evasion, black-market earnings, and the subsistence gardening that augmented the declared incomes), the level of poverty was none the less extraordinary, whether measured by Soviet or Western standards.
One revealing index of immiseration was demographic decline: from 148.6 million 1993 to 146.3 million in 2001. This population decrease was partly due to a low birth rate (among the lowest in the world), but chiefly to a sharp increase in mortality. One revealing indicator was the drop in life expectancy, which peaked at 65 for men and 75 for women in 1985 but had dropped to 59 for men and 72 for women in 2000. While partly due to a high rate of infant mortality (two to three times that of Western countries), higher death rates became pandemic for the working-age population. Particularly revealing was the prospect for a 16-year-old male living to the age of 80: the rate in the United States was 88 per cent, but a mere 58 per cent in Russia—only slightly higher than a century earlier (56 per cent in 1895). Given these dismal patterns, contemporary studies by the United Nations and the Russian Academy of Sciences project that Russia’s initial population of 148.6 million (1993) will shrink to 130 million by 2015 and even drop to 100 million by 2050, perhaps sinking as low as 70 or 80 million. Such a cataclysmic decrease means an immense contraction in labour inputs and, simultaneously, a dangerous imbalance in the proportion of the workforce to pensioners (dropping officially from 2 : 1 in 1991 to 1.4 : 1 in 1999).
Critics attribute this demographic implosion to the destitution engendered by transition. Both nuptiality and fertility fell sharply: fewer married and still fewer bore children, with 70 per cent of pregnancies terminated through abortion. Still more important was the rise in mortality, especially in the middle range of the labour force. That was partly due to a deterioration in diet, with a significant reduction in meat consumption (33 per cent) and dairy products (over 40 per cent). Even with a compensatory increase in carbohydrate consumption, Russian daily caloric intake in the 1990s was only 62 per cent of the norm recommended by the World Health Organization. Bad living habits (astronomic rates of smoking and massive consumption of cheap alcohol) also took a toll; the explosion of prostitution (with 4,000 brothels in Moscow alone) raised sexually transmitted diseases to epidemic proportions (the syphilis rate, for example, increased seventyfold in the 1990s); and the vast increase in drug addiction spawned new scourges like Aids. Russia reported 135,000 officially registered HIV cases, but the real rate was probably five times greater; in specific cases, the increase was of horrifying magnitude—for example, the number of HIV-infected in Tver jumped from 8 in 1997 to 2,342 four years later. Even diseases once thought to be eradicated have roared back in full force; in particular, deadly strains of tuberculosis—widespread in the large prison population—have produced a mortality rate thirty times that of the United States.
