Translated material
Life is jammed
How issues of private inconvenience turn into an angry public mood and become a political argument. Social survey data
Photo: Dmitry Dukhanin / Kommersant
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Last April, Levada Center* and Novaya Gazeta’s Laboratory of the Future took the risk of asking Russians the following question:
Do you agree that there are too many inconveniences in our daily lives?
What was the risk? The fact is that different people could understand completely different circumstances as inconvenience. And the attitude towards inconvenience is different - some are indifferent, others are nervous. Different people can present different sources of inconvenience: “it’s they who arranged this life for us”... Or: “it’s us who are lazy and indifferent.” Or maybe it’s something else: we don’t pay attention to these little things, we are now busy with something completely different, more important!
But now the survey has taken place, we look closely at its results and are relieved to see that people in Russia quite willingly answered the question posed exactly this way. About one twentieth of all respondents refused and found it difficult to answer. This is the usual level, and it is approximately the same in all categories of respondents, except that pensioners found it difficult a little more often.
We were right in assuming that the lives of the poor and the lives of the rich deal with inconvenience differently. Among the poorest, a third said with certainty that there are too many inconveniences in their lives—this is more than in any other social group and category. And among the rich - half as much, and this is less than in any other social group.
We repeat, we cannot know from the results of this survey alone which inconveniences are too many in the lives of the poor and which inconveniences in the lives of the rich.
But the wording of the question allows us to see that in society there is a norm for inconvenience - whatever it may be. And this norm is violated much more in the lives of the poor than in the lives of the rich.
The survey results allow us to look at the situation described from a different angle. The least likely people to complain about excessive inconvenience are bosses (those who, in many ways, established the rules of our lives). And most often - those who are now looking for work, who for some time have been completely knocked out of the usual forms and rhythms of life, for whom this makes their existence more inconvenient than yours and mine, and even more so than that of their bosses.
The most strongly expressed opinions about the excessiveness of the inconvenience relate to the responses of those who “definitely agree” with this assessment of our lives. In general, there are 24% of them in the entire corps of respondents. There are much more people who chose a softer wording for their answer: “rather agree” - 43%.
Total: more than two-thirds of Russian residents surveyed are dissatisfied with how much inconvenience there is in their lives. Those who rather disagree with this amount to 20%, while those who “definitely disagree” in general are very few - 7%, almost the same number as those who declined to answer.
This means that for the majority of people in the country, life does not seem to be the way it should be, it is not just inconvenient, but too inconvenient...
We see that the degree of inconvenience is different for people with different incomes. But the survey also showed that Russians see inconvenience not only in the material side of life. In every survey, we ask people a kind of ideological question about whether, in their opinion, Russia is moving in the right direction. As in all Putin years, the majority finds the path correct. But their share has been declining recently, while the share of those who find the wrong direction is growing. And if even among those who think our direction is correct, two-thirds find that there are too many inconveniences, then among those who are dissatisfied with the course, three-quarters of them are.
The “inconveniences” that people mean when answering our question have not only everyday and general ideological connotations, but also some political connotations. This is evident from the fact that among people who refuse to approve Vladimir Putin’s activities as President of the Russian Federation - they are still in the minority, but their number is growing - more than twice as often as among those who approve, they say with certainty: “there are too many inconveniences.”