Deep Poverty in Russia: The Specifics of the Objective and Subjective Poor and Their Requests for Social Policy

The paper focuses on the Russian poor. Based on the fact revealed in previous studies that severe chronic poverty is characterized by concomitant psycho-emotional deprivation, the author focuses not only on monetary poverty (using the relative income-based approach to group allocation for this purpose), but also subjective one (distinguished through non-monetary indicators). Based on the research database of the the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2018), the author comes to the conclusion that the most negative perception of the position in society is not a characteristic of the financiallypoorest Russians, i.e. the focus of social tension is not concentrated in the zone of deep monetary poverty. While objective (monetary) deep poverty is formed as a result of high dependent burdens and failures of local labor markets, deep subjective poverty is dictated by different reasons – the inaccessibility of the necessary medical support for pensioners with serious health problems, the presence of relatives in the household who are addicted to bad habits, precarious nature of the occupied employment positions. The delimitation of groups and the varying nature of the factors of their formation leads the author to the conclusion that identifying the recipients of social policy solely on the basis of information about the financial situation of households does not allow reaching the part of the poor population where a hotbed of social tension is forming. Based on the identified characteristics of groups, as well as the requests of their representatives for certain measures of social policy, the article proposes a number of measures to reduce the severity of objective and subjective poverty.