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INTRODUCTION
During the 1990s, Russia passed through one of the most harrowing macro-adjustment processes of modern times, involving the loss of several million jobs, severe reductions in the real value of social welfare benefits, and wage arrears that, at their peak in 1997, affected around two-thirds of the workforce and amounted to 38% of the estimated GDP in September 1998 (Lehman et al. , 1999; Gerber, 2006; Mitra and Yemtsov, 2006). In the process, the Gini index of inequality rose from one of the lowest in the world to a level higher than that of the United States (Brainerd, 1998). The headcount index of poverty, although measures of this vary, grew by a factor of about three (Klugman and Braithwaite, 1998); there was a general deterioration in health, extensively surveyed by Stillman (2006); and even suicide rates experienced a sharp upward trend (Brainerd, 2001).
Political consequences of transition were manifested in miners' strikes in the Kuznets Basin in 1989 and 1990 and - as Russia's shock therapy gained momentum - in other forms of collective action such as street protests and outbreaks of industrial unrest. In the process of this adjustment, the traditionally powerful and centralized Russian state underwent extreme stresses, and through much of its early transition to democratic forms of government stood 'on the precipice of state failure' (Giuliano, 2006, p. 276).1
The wave of public protest following the recession of 2009, and, more recently, the general election of December 2011 have reawakened interest in the modalities and dynamics of political protest, and their interrelationship with the stability of government. This paper, therefore, attempts to contribute to survey-based research on political protest by identifying and analyzing influences on individuals' willingness to participate in protest activities. We focus on the Russian financial crisis of August 1998 and model the impact of economic and welfare factors on protest intentions. We test the model by examining the impact on individual behavior of these determinants. Empirically, the results show that the likelihood of protest relates powerfully to economic discontent - similar to what McAllister and White (1994) found.
The structure of this paper is as follows. The next section gives a background to political economy, protest and social issues. In the subsequent section, we present the...