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Chapter 6 Implications The Russian public has considered the wage arrears crisis one of the biggest problems—if not the single biggest problem—facing the country, yet only a minority of those experiencing arrears have mobilized to protest the situation. Instead, most Russians have endured the situation without taking any political action. Their reaction confounds the expectations of several prominent students of democratization and postcommunist politics who only recently predicted that a public would not long tolerate the economic hardships associated with market reform but would channel its impatience and frustration into political action. Public outcries against wage arrears and other failures of market transition would therefore also doom democratic transition. This prediction of public unrest is at the core of other predictions about the incompatibility of democratic and market transitions. This quite logical prediction did not materialize, however, largely because public impatience and frustration do not necessarily assume an active form. As students of collective action have observed for decades, people respond to economic hardship with passivity more often than protest. The leap from grievance to action is a long shot. While a variety of factors undoubtedly in›uence an individual’s political behavior, I have emphasized one very important one, the ability to make speci‹c attributions of blame for a problem. The more speci‹c the attribution, the more likely the individual is to attempt to redress the grievance through protest. The less speci‹c the attribution, the more likely the individual is to respond passively. The task of blame attribution depends largely on perceptions of accountability and therefore has a strong subjective dimension, but it also depends on the complexity of a grievance, which has a strong objective component. In the particular case of the Russian wage crisis, the delay or nonpayment of trillions of rubles worth of salaries, pensions, and stipends is an objectively complex situation, and its complexity is compounded by the many individuals and institutions that have intentionally clouded the 223 situation further to avoid blame and by the aggrieved individuals themselves , who have had little time, energy, and inclination to sort through piles of information and arguments to draw causal linkages. Only a small percentage of Russians have taken on the task and ultimately attributed blame for their predicament to a speci‹c target. The successful attributors have been Russia’s most likely protesters. These ‹ndings have both theoretical and practical implications. On the theoretical side, the ‹ndings point to the importance of a previously understudied aspect of collective action decisions: the ease or dif‹culty of the issue at hand and the varying willingness and ability of aggrieved individuals to navigate dif‹cult issues in search of a speci‹c blameworthy target of protest. Speci‹c attributions of blame for a grievance lower the costs of collective action by reducing the need for information, organization , and time. Diffuse or vague attributions of blame do just the opposite. By incorporating the concept of blame attribution into existing theories of protest, we get a more complete understanding of the collective action dilemma and why some individuals overcome it. We should then be able to apply this understanding to studies of protest in a comparative context. For example, the ease or dif‹culty of speci‹c blame attribution should play a role in the protest decisions of individuals experiencing payment arrears in the non-Russian parts of the former Soviet Union and, most importantly, in the protest decisions of individuals experiencing other types of grievances anywhere in the world. The greater the ability to specify blame for the grievance, the more likely the aggrieved are to protest. On the practical side, the ‹ndings suggest that large-scale social unrest in Russia is an unlikely response to the arrears crisis. Wages, pensions, and stipends may continue to be delayed or paid erratically, but passivity will probably continue to outweigh protest as the chosen public reaction. This does not mean, however, that extended periods of nonpayment will have no political rami‹cations. If attributing blame for the crisis is dif‹cult, then what might be most appreciated is an outlet for pent-up frustration, and one of the easiest outlets is to scapegoat already unpopular groups, such as Jews, Caucasians, or the West. The accusations need not be accurate or even logical, but if they are simple and clear, they may ‹nd a receptive audience. Demagoguery, more than social unrest, is the frightening cloud hanging over Russia. In this concluding chapter, I will elaborate on these...

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