Oksana, a 30-year-old from Siberia, moved to Moscow a year ago. She rents a room in a small, simple apartment in Zhukovka, on the outskirts of the city, close to the area where many in Russia’s political and business elite live, in large mansions screened from the road by high, forest-green fencing.

“You see them going past every day in their motorcades, and it just seems like a different world,” Oksana says. Often, she is delayed as she drives to her secretarial job, as the road is closed for government officials to speed past with police escorts. “I was never that interested in politics before, but seeing just how unfair it is, it does make you wonder if you should be doing something to change it.”

Measuring levels of inequality, rather than simply tracking absolute poverty levels, has become a watchword for economists of late, with some believing it is the uneven distribution of wealth that is one of the key factors driving political discontent and disenfranchisement globally.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, the head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, said increased inequality was one of a number of factors leading to the rise of populism around the world – adding she had first warned of these dangers four years ago, but that after the victory of Donald Trump in the US and the increasing popularity of far-right parties across Europe, she hoped people would now pay it more attention.

Inequality streets: 1% of the Russian population is said to hold 46% of all the country’s personal bank deposits. Photograph: Balhash/Getty Images

A recent report by Credit Suisse showed that Russia is the most unequal of all the world’s major economies. The richest 10% of Russians own 87% of all the country’s wealth, according to the report, compared with 76% in the US and 66% in China. According to another measure, by VTB Capital, 1% of the Russian population holds 46% of all the personal bank deposits in the country.

Many Russians believe such rampant inequality – at least in part caused by corruption – might cause “kitchen grumbling”, but never serious political upheaval. However, last month the biggest protests to hit Russia for several years saw an estimated 60,000 people on the streets of nearly 80 cities. While the numbers are small as a percentage of the whole population, there is a sense that anger may be stirring.

An investigation by the opposition politician Alexei Navalny earlier this year alleged that Russia’s prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, had amassed a collection of luxury properties, yachts and vineyards during his time in office. The silence in response to the allegations helped prompt the protests. Medvedev subsequently dismissed the report as “nonsense”.

Alexei Navalny after his latest arrest. Photograph: Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty

Navalny has announced his intention to stand in next year’s presidential election, and much of his current campaign is based around fighting inequality: at the launch of his regional headquarters in Chelyabinsk earlier this month, many of the slogans on the posters were directly about the excesses of the wealthy ruling elite. “Hospitals and roads, not palaces for officials,” read one. The first line on campaign leaflets reads: “A dignified life for everyone, and not wealth for the 0.1%.”

Navalny’s allegations against Medvedev were just the latest in a series of truly shocking revelations about the inner circle of government, which are usually either ignored or formulaically denied. Navalny alleged that the wife of first deputy prime minister Igor Shuvalov used a private jet to fly her corgis around Europe for competitions, while vast palatial residences outside Moscow are the norm for the top tier of government. Shuvalov refused to comment on the allegation. Then there are the billionaire businessmen, who have had a reputation for obscene spending on yachts, global properties and lavish parties for two decades.

Working for small salaries, then watching videos about the yachts and palaces of government officials and government-linked oligarchs makes people angry, says Navalny. “For a few years there was only poverty out in the sticks, but now it’s striking at the big cities too, and becoming a huge protest driver, because people start thinking about it. You think about it even if you live in Moscow and have a decent salary – but if you live in a regional centre and have a monthly salary of 15,000 roubles (just over £200), it’s a different thing altogether.”

A new class of billionaire



The situation with inequality in Russia is wrapped up in the context of the extraordinary past quarter-century of history, with the collapse of the Soviet system leading to privatisation in the 1990s.

In theory, the Soviet Union was a state working towards full equality. The 1977 constitution called for “the elimination of class differences and of the essential distinctions between town and country, and between mental and physical labour”.

Vladimir Putin inside the Kremlin. A new class of Russian billionaire has appeared in the past decade, many of them personally linked to the Russian president. Photograph: Tass/Barcroft Images

In the late 1970s, only 0.2% of people earned more than four times the average wage in the Soviet Union, according to official statistics. Of course, many complained that the Soviet elite lived a more luxurious life than the majority of the population, relying on the “grey economy” to access luxury products and other consumer goods that were unavailable to normal citizens, even if the differences in official salaries were not that high.

But the levels of inequality that came about in 1990s Russia were far more dramatic and shocking. Capitalism turned out to be just how the Soviets had warned, with a few people requisitioning all the ladders and the vast majority left to be devoured by snakes. In the far north and east extremities of the country, where people had settled because the Soviet system paid high salaries, the market economy sent industrial towns into ruin, making whole regions impoverished.

Vladimir Putin took over in 2000 and promised to bring the country together and end the chaos of the 90s. In the early Putin period, pensions and salaries were paid for the first time in years – while the super-rich continued to have lifestyles unthinkable to most Russians. During the later period, a new class of billionaire appeared, many of them personally linked to the Russian president – but the government’s message of stability has continued to resonate among a population scared of upheavals.



There’s also an assumption here that all rulers are corrupt, and steal. When Oksana, irate at the lengthy holdups as the elite motorcades sped past, complained to her mother-in-law about the palaces, she was told: “Putin is a superhero, and if he wanted one more palace, I’d donate my savings to help him build it.”



A revolutionary and a lunatic



Yury Bykov is a prematurely greying 35-year-old who looks permanently weary and has made two brilliant, gut-wrenchingly miserable films about life in the Russian regions.

He grew up in a downtrodden village near an electricity plant a few hours’ drive from Moscow, and makes films about the disconnect between ordinary Russians and the financial and political elites. “A full man can’t understand a hungry man, as we say here,” he says.

A still from Yury Bykov’s most recent film, The Fool

Bykov hopes to start filming on his new project, The Factory, in autumn. The plot revolves around an ageing plant that is due to be closed by its oligarch owner because it is no longer economically viable. Furious and desperate, the angry workers lure the oligarch to visit, then take him hostage. “It’s a film about what a person can do, and what a person should do, to try to change things. Where’s the line between a revolutionary and a lunatic?”

Bykov says he wants Russia’s rulers to stop and think about the levels of inequality in the country. If not, he warns, they will have to face the inevitable consequences, which will be painful for everyone.

A full man can’t understand a hungry man, as we say here Yury Bykov

But for all Bykov’s anger at inequality, he does not have a particularly rosy view of the “common man” either. His most recent film, The Fool, tells the story of Dima Nikitin, a well-meaning municipal plumber who discovers a giant crack in a creaking old apartment block that means the whole building could collapse at any time. The building is in such a poor state because the local mayor has pilfered the funds earmarked for its renovation.



When Dima interrupts a lavish party to tell the local officials about the impending tragedy, they don’t take him seriously. But the apartment block residents, when he tries to rouse them to protest, see him as a dangerous intruder rather than their saviour. It is a bleak view of popular consciousness.

“I don’t think people in Russia really care much about inequality per se,” Bykov says. “We are a feudal country; we only abolished serfdom in 1861. People just want a bit of bread and a roof over the heads, that’s the basic demand. They won’t go out to protest unless things are really, really bad. But then, once they do, they won’t go out demanding dialogue, they’ll go out with pitchforks demanding blood.”

A protester shouts from a police bus after being detained during March’s anti-corruption rally in central Moscow. Photograph: Maxim Shipenkov/EPA

Discussions about inequality in Russia often circle back to this kind of musing on the Russian soul and the long arc of Russian history. Sophie Shevardnadze, granddaughter of the last Soviet foreign minister and a TV presenter whose most recent programme is a chat show that fixes marital problems among Russians, usually from low-income families, agrees that ordinary Russians don’t care that much about the wealth gap.

“I recently watched a documentary series on the Romanov dynasty that described how people have lived since the 1600s, and with every new tsar the main problem was tackling corruption and bureaucracy,” she says. “The national wealth would end up distributed among the nobles and would never reach the masses.

“I have the feeling that the only changes are cosmetic, and in a way, Putin is faced with the same problem. The government machinery that stands between the president and the people is so heavily bureaucratised and corrupt that it’s unable to fulfil even the simplest requests of citizens. And because it’s been like that since for ever, it seems the Russian people have become used to enduring inequality and feel numb about it.”

An ‘us versus them’ mentality



Navalny says the insistence that Russian people cannot get angry about inequality is nonsense. The steady, incremental increases in prosperity that characterised the first Putin decade tailed off after 2014, when declining oil prices and western sanctions combined to hammer the Russian economy.

People are unable to live normally. They don’t understand why it should be like this in 21st-century Russia Alexei Navalny

Approximately 23 million Russians – about 16% of the population – now officially subsist below the poverty line, and there are increasing signs that the huge concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny percentage of the population is starting to annoy more Russians – especially as many of the richest people are government officials, or those close to them. A recent report found that 41% of Russians say they struggle to get enough money together for food and clothing.

Increasingly, there is an “us versus them” mentality. At a recent environmental protest in Chelyabinsk against the construction of a new high-polluting mining and processing plant, local activist Yury Cherkasov shouted from the stage: “If we don’t come together and fight this plant, in 10 years our environment will be completely destroyed, and we’ll be left here being poisoned by this filth while they take all the money out to Panama and Cyprus.”

Georgy, from Siberia, at a homeless clinic in Moscow. Around 23 million Russians now officially subsist below the poverty line. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Sergei Shargunov, a 36-year-old MP who is part of the Communist party’s faction in the Duma despite not actually being a communist, admits that “people think the world of politics and politicians is completely alien to them, and not without reason”.

Shargunov represents four Siberian districts, and says he does his best to help his constituents overcome financial problems. He recently helped raise 700,000 roubles (£9,700) via crowdfunding to help out a single mother who was threatened with being evicted from her home as she could not keep up with mortgage repayments. He is in favour of introducing a tax on the super-rich, and creating a more progressive income tax scale (Russia currently has a flat income tax rate of just 13%).

“Of course, the popularity of this government is based on the fact that it’s the lesser evil,” says Shargunov. “People aren’t stupid; they understand everything – but after the experience of perestroika and then the 1990s, they are scared that if things changed, they could become even worse. I’m hoping the authorities will get better at building dialogue with the people, because nobody wants upheavals and revolution.”

But Navalny believes protesting is the only way to fight inequality in Russia, and he dismisses claims that the Russian people are somehow inert or prone to passivity. He says a combination of outright poverty and anger at the wealth of the elite could prove to be a potent mix.

“The people that come and volunteer for us tend to be the most progressive locals, but when you ask how much they earn, they tell you 15,000 or 18,000 roubles [£200-£255 per month],” he says. “They are unable to live normally, and they don’t understand why it should be like this in 21st-century Russia. It’s not that they’ve got nothing to lose, but the realisation that there are so few prospects in life makes people much bolder.”

Over the coming year, the Guardian’s Inequality Project will shed new light on issues of inequality and social unfairness around the world. Read all of our coverage here. To get in touch, email us at inequality.project@theguardian.com.