Protest and the Politics of Blame: The Russian Response to Unpaid Wages

Chapter 4. The Politics of Blame

Chapter 4 The Politics of Blame Ordinary Russians have varied not only in their opinions about the cause of wage, pension, and stipend delays but also in whether they have identi‹ed a cause at all. Some have attributed blame for the arrears crisis with great precision and conviction, and some have not. These differences have played an important role politically. Those Russians who have most speci‹cally attributed blame for their grievances have been more active in strikes, demonstrations, or other acts of protest than Russians who have not attributed blame speci‹cally. Because relatively few Russians have clearly and consistently attributed blame, aggregate political activism in response to the complicated issue of wage arrears has been low throughout Russia even when arrears have peaked. In this chapter, I test these propositions using survey responses as evidence of participation in acts of protest. To guard against problems of recall and other measurement error, I use three different measures. One is participation (whether through striking, demonstrating, or both) in the national day of protest against wage arrears organized by trade unions on March 27, 1997. Another is participation in the national day of protest against wage arrears organized by trade unions on April 9, 1998. Both these events were well publicized and prompted speci‹cally by prolonged delays and nonpayment of wages. A third measure is a more general one of participation in any strikes, demonstrations, or acts of protest within the past three years, thus capturing behavior outside the nationwide events. For all measures of protest, the data provide strong evidence that speci‹city of blame attribution has a signi‹cant and powerful effect. Protesting Wage Arrears The literature on collective action and social movements leads to a few expectations about the Russian public’s response to wage arrears: (1) given that direct personal experience with a grievance rouses people to 129 action more than do grievances that touch people only tangentially, we should expect a fairly impressive political response from the enormous population of Russians who have been directly affected by the delay or nonpayment of wages; (2) conversely, given that collective action is usually the exception, not the norm (as mentioned earlier, usually only about 5 percent of affected individuals protest), we should expect only a minority of Russians to have acted on their grievances over wage delays and nonpayment; and (3) given that people protest over grievances about production issues like unemployment more often than about consumption issues like in›ation, we should expect wage arrears and the quasi-unemployment situation that wage arrears created to have sparked more unrest than other devastating problems faced by many Russians (Lichbach 1995, 37, 292–93). Expectations 2 and 3 are met. First, protesters in Russia have been a minority of the population. Only 7 percent of Russians claimed to have participated in the nationwide strikes of March 1997, related protest activities , or both, and only 5 percent claimed to have participated in similar activities in April 1998 (table 4.1). For the most part, these activists have tended to be the same people, and they have tended to choose the same form of protest. Eighty-eight percent of those who participated in some manner in the 1998 events also participated in the 1997 events. More speci‹cally, 62 percent of 1998 strikers also struck in 1997, and 88 percent of 1998 protesters also protested in 1997. There is reason to suspect that actual protesters have represented an even smaller minority of the Russian population than this already small minority of reported protesters, because some survey respondents might have overreported their activism to portray themselves as civic-minded. This type of misreporting is probably not systematically related to attribu130 Protest and the Politics of Blame TABLE 4.1. Participation in Protest Activities (in percentages, by column) March 1997 April 1998 Past 3 Years Did you personally . . . strike 2 1 2 protest 4 3 5 both 1 1 2 neither 87 90 89 Never heard about this 4 3 — Note: Total number of respondents = 2,021. tions of blame for wage arrears or other variables of interest in this study and therefore probably does not bias the ‹ndings described in the rest of this chapter. Since reported protest has probably exceeded actual protest, it is still reasonable to describe protest over wage arrears in Russia as low even in relation to the 5 percent yardstick discussed in chapter...