Policies Against Poverty in Russia – A Female Responsibility

Abstract

This article analyses how social policies in Russia can give poor people opportunities to improve their life situations given the persisting norms of a moral and practical female responsibility for social welfare. Women working in the social sphere have created their own support networks for helping people to take part in state programmes and to become entitled to support in one way or the other. Their agenda is clearly larger than the directives they might be subject to from above. They use relations to create resources. Analysing the agency of women who are professionally working in the social sphere supports distinguishing their potential roles of empowering the poor from their controlling roles. Empirical data are based on qualitative interviews with social work experts, social workers, social pedagogues at schools, teachers, doctor’s assistants, local politicians and deputies of commissions or local village councils in two Russian regions.

keywords:

• social policies
• poverty
• Russia
• women’s work
• female responsibility

Acknowledgements

The field work has been supported by the Swedish Institute, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, Lobachevsky State University of Nizhniy Novgorod, Nizhniy Novgorod Scientific Research Centre for Economics, Society and Science (EON) and Swedish Research Council. Field research in Russia has been organized and made together with Leo Granberg, Nina Ivashinenko, Liya Kalinnikova, Rebecca Kay, Margarita Lobanova, Alexander Soldatkin and Alla Varyzgina. I want to express my gratitude to them and also to several other persons who participated in research work in different important roles. I would like to express special thanks to Leo Granberg for his valuable comments.

Notes

1. The continued dependency on natural resources is reflected in employment patterns as well as in relative wages in the 1990s (Sätre 2001). In the first decade of the new century, average wages continued to be highest in the gas industry and oil extraction, and lowest in agriculture and the consumer industry (Remington 2011, 102–103). State Committee for Statistics 2005, 107–109, 2008, 122–124.

2. Federal law No 122, 22 August 2004. A key task was to divide administrative and financial responsibility for providing benefits (l’goty) between the central level and the regions, which means that regions support two-thirds of the recipients. See Wengle and Rassell (2008), 743–744.

3. Federal law No 131 “On the General Principles of Organisation of Local Self-governance in the Russian Federation” came into force on 1 January 2006. A key task involved increased responsibility for self-financing of costs along with the introduction of a fourth level of administration (poselenie) within each community.

4. According to official figures, the accumulated assets of the Stabilisation Fund were more than twenty times higher in 2007 than 2004 (State Committee for Statistics 2008, 33). The fund, which was established in 2004, was split into a Reserve Fund and a National Welfare Fund in 2008.

5. One sign of this is the low priority in the Soviet time that was attributed to social production and social services in the distribution of budgets (Voronin 2002, 53).

Additional information

Funding

The author greatly appreciates the research grant from the Swedish Research Council.

Funding

The author greatly appreciates the funding from the Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies (UCRS), Uppsala University, the research grant from the Swedish Research Council and the research collaboration grant from the Swedish Institute.