Russia's post-1998 fledgling middle class is described as young, well-educated, well-traveled, community-orientated, entrepreneurial and suffused with work ethic and a desire for social mobility. It is almost as if the crisis four years ago served as a purgatory, purging sins and sinners alike and creating the conditions for the revival of a healthier, longer-lived, bourgeoisie.
But being middle class is a state of mind more than a measure of wealth. It is an all-encompassing worldview, a set of values, a code of conduct, a list of goals, aspirations, fantasies and preferences and a catalog of moral do's and don'ts. This is where transition, micromanaged by western "experts" failed.
The mere exposure to free markets was supposed to unleash innovation and entrepreneurship in the long-oppressed populations of east Europe. When this prescription - known as "shock therapy" - bombed, the West tried to engender a stable, share-holding, business-owning, middle class by financing small size enterprises. It then proceeded to strengthen and transform indigenous institutions.
None of it worked. Transition had no grassroots support and its prescriptive - and painful - nature caused wide resentment and obstruction. When the dust settled, Russia found itself with a putative - and puny - middle class. But it was an anomalous beast, very different from its ostensible European or American counterparts.
To start with, Russia's new middle class is a distinct minority.
Prism, a publication of the Jamestown Foundation, quoted, in its August 2001 issue, the Serbian author Milorad Pavic as saying that "the Russian middle class is like a young generation whose fathers suffered a severe defeat in a war: with no feeling of guilt and no victorious fathers to boss them around, the children of defeat see no obstacles before them."
But this metaphor is misleading. The Russian middle class is a nascent exception - not an overarching rule. As Akos Rona-Tas, Associate Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of California, San Diego, notes correctly in his paper "Post Communist Transition and the Absent Middle Class in Central East Europe", a middle class that is in the minority is an oxymoron: