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Inequality in Russia during transformation: to Europe or Latin America?
During 90s the post-socialist countries tried to proceed to market and democracy to be reached by forming of middle classes, democratic institutes and elites. However, by XXI century it became obvious that countries of Central and Eastern Europe and Russia chose different ways of development. Russia went by not a European but by a Latin American model. CEE came close to a “European” distribution of income and have generally joined the European democratic tradition. Russia has come to the distribution of income and consumption of Anglo-Saxon norms, but of distribution of property to Latin American ones.
Problems of democracy and development in Russia should be go close in comparison with Latin American situation. The features of Russian democracy model, especially the situation of 90s have predetermined the line of factors often being missed during analysis (especially the privatization character). In this paper we tried to delineate the factors that determined the distinction of democracy of Russia and other post-socialist countries, which thereby predefined the likeness with Latin American model. It is necessary to take into account the specific character of property distribution in conjunction with the middle class position in the post-transformation society. Nowadays the weakness of middle class, conflicts inside of elites and combination of Latin American inequality with recourse curse form an interesting situation for a further research.