They had seen something more devastating than the fact that some of their compatriots were better off: they saw that, beyond the country’s western borders, virtually everyone was better off than virtually everyone in Russia. They had felt themselves to be not just poor individuals but people from a poor country. As this self-perception solidified, so did some of the results of Gudkov’s surveys: the gap between answers to the questions “How much do you earn?” and “How much do you need to earn to survive?” closed. This did not mean that people felt like they had enough; they felt like things
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