Russia’s “impressionable years”: life experience during the exit from communism and Putin-era beliefs

ABSTRACT

This article links Russians’ individual experiences during the late-Gorbachev and early-Yeltsin years to beliefs they espoused in the Putin era, over a decade later. Drawing on the 2006 wave of the Life in Transition Survey, I show that a range of attitudes – including diminished support for markets and democracy and stronger support for reducing inequality – can be explained by whether an individual suffered labor market hardships in the half decade from 1989 to 1994. Subsequent labor market disruptions, surprisingly, bear no such relationship to beliefs in 2006. Relative to the rest of the former Soviet Union, this pattern is unique. Though an explanation is difficult to pin down, one speculative hypothesis is that for Russians, individual economic hardship, in conjunction with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, may have been particularly disorienting. Life experiences during those years of instability, uncertainty, and diminished status may have left a uniquely enduring impression.

KEYWORDS:

• Political and economic attitudes
• labor market
• transition
• Russia

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank an anonymous referee, Tom Eeckhout, Richard Ericson, Denis Ivanov, Michael Rochlitz, and Andrei Yakovlev for their thoughtful comments as well as participants at the Second Ghent Russia Colloquium, the Eighth International ICSID conference, the BOFIT research seminar, and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies conference in San Francisco. Excellent research assistance in the completion of this article was provided by Ivy Yang and Olivia Jin.

Notes

1. Accessed 6 May 2020 at http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/22,931.

2. That periods of social upheaval can have lasting effects on beliefs and values resonates with recent neuroscience findings that emotionally weighty experiences alter brain hardware. According to the Synaptic Tagging and Capture hypothesis (Frey and Morris 1997), local tagging of synapses during an experience makes for a more stable connection between synapses. The more intense the emotional experience, the stronger it is anchored in memory, and the more easily it can be retrieved in the future (Talarico, LaBar, and Rubin 2004; LaBar and Cabeza 2006).

3. Pushing this logic further, one’s labor market status at a point in time should be correlated with one’s beliefs and values at the same point in time. There is ample cross-sectional evidence that this is true (Hayo 2004; Alesina and Giuliano 2011).

4. Between 1990 and 2006, the most dramatic swings in the structure of output in Russia occurred between 1991 and 1992 and between 1994 and 1995 (Pyle 2018).

5. Known as the “impressionable years” hypothesis, it inspired the name given to the hypothesis tested in this article.

6. Relatedly, Malmendier and Nagel (2016) show that differences across individuals in lifetime experiences with inflation predict variation in their inflation expectations.

7. The literature exploiting the post-War division of Germany as a natural experiment to explore the lasting effects of living through communism on social preferences is large. Becker, Mergele, and Woessmann (2020) provide a survey and critique.

8. Relatedly, two articles draw on survey data to show a connection between individual experiences in the early post-communist years and material well-being in the twenty-first century. Myck and Oczowska (2018) use the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to demonstrate that unemployment in Poland between 1989 and 1991 correlates negatively with income and asset ownership in 2007 and 2012. Using the 2016 wave of the LiTS, Adsera et al. (2019) show that cohorts born at the start of the post-communist transition are shorter than their older and younger peers.

9. Further related to the analysis here, the authors show that the number of years one experienced wage cuts and/or arrears between 1989 and 2006 correlates strongly and positively with anti-privatization beliefs in 2006.

10. The famous sociologist Yurii Levada (2001) described a similar malaise with respect to political reforms that occurred mid-decade: “The emotional dissatisfaction among the masses that was directed against the Party and the Soviet system in 1989-90 gave way after 1993-94 to … disillusionment with democratic forces and reforms … ” (22).

11. The early 1990s were characterized by hyperinflation and pyramid schemes. Consumer prices rose by at least 100% each year between 1991 and 1995; annual rates between 1992 and 1994 were all above 300% (https://www.imf.org/en/Countries/RUS#countrydata, accessed 17 May 2020). MMM, the largest pyramid scheme, was launched and collapsed in 1994; at its peak, it took in millions of dollars each day; 5 to 10 million Russians were estimated to have lost money upon its collapse.

12. Yeltsin’s campaign for the sovereignty of the Russian republic in 1990 and 1991 was linked more to the power struggle with Gorbachev and the desire to speed up political and economic reform than to a wish to end the Soviet Union per se (Duncan 2005).

13. The anthropologist, Serguei Oushakine (2009), writes in Patriotism of Despair about the particular emotional impact for Russians of the Soviet collapse: “As in many other cases before, Putin’s address did not offer a distinctively new vision but mostly articulated an opinion that was already widespread in the country … ” (80).

14. The LiTS was not administered in Turkmenistan in 2006.

15. While subject to recall errors, data collected through retrospective questions carry the advantage of avoiding panel attrition.

16. Some respondents, because of age or choice, will not be in the labor force for a portion of or all the years between 1989 and 2006.

17. In Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), on the other hand, transition-induced labor market hardships were more frequently associated with unemployment or labor force exits (Boeri and Terrell 2002).

18. The primary results below are robust using only “experienced wage cuts and/or arrears” as the measure of labor market hardship.

19. The annual time series data presented in Figure 3 do not perfectly track the actual percentage of the labor force experiencing disruptions in the manner we define. For instance, arrears in Russia likely peaked in 1998 (Desai and Idson 2000); many respondents who were of working age in 1989 were not in the labor force, for various reasons (e.g., retirement, discouragement, and health), by the late 1990s.

20. Bound, Brown, and Mathiowetz (2001) summarize several US-based studies that find that for retrospective reports of labor force status the underreporting rate is not insignificant and may be related to demographic characteristics. In a developing country context, Beckett et al. (2001) find the quality of long-term retrospective histories to be quite high, particularly with respect to the occurrence of events as opposed to their specific details.

21. The household panel component of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey begins in 1994.

22. Specifically, respondents answered two questions introduced as follows: “With which one of the following statements do you agree most?” For the economics-themed question, the alternative statements, for which our dependent variable takes the value of “0,” are: “Under some circumstances a planned economy may be preferable to a market economy,” and, “For people like me, it does not matter whether the economic system is organized as a market economy or as a planned economy.” In a similar manner, alternate responses to one’s preferred political system included: “Under some circumstances, an authoritarian government may be preferable to a democratic one,” and “For people like me, it does not matter whether a government is democratic or authoritarian.”

23. Income inequality is widely recognized to have grown dramatically in Russia between 1989 and 2006. According to Novokmet, Piketty, and Zeman (2018), the share of the top 10% of income earners grew from 23.7% in 1989 to 49.2% in 2006. Much of that change had occurred by 1994, when the comparable figure was 42.4%. Data accessed at gabriel-zucman.edu/Russia/on 23 April 2020.

24. Alesina and Giuliano (2011) show that higher internal locus of control relates to weaker preferences for redistribution.

25. The World Values Survey consists of nationally representative surveys using a common questionnaire. Conducted across seven waves, beginning in 1981, it is the largest cross-national, time series investigation of beliefs and values ever executed.

26. The exercise described here is like one performed in Gaber et al. (2019) in using WVS data to compare Russians and Poles over time, beginning in 1990.

27. Their levels of development differed in 1990 (e.g., Russia was more industrialized than Belarus) and they launched liberalizing reforms in different years and at different speeds (e.g., Russia introduced rapid price liberalization in 1992, two years after Poland). Nevertheless, besides sharing roots in the command economic system, all five did begin 1990 in a reform-induced recession and doubled the share of the private sector in GDP between 1990 and 1995. Russia and Belarus experienced very similar declines in per capita GDP between those two years (Bolt et al. 2018).

28. These include gender, age, marital status, employment status, and subjectively assigned relative economic well-being.