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Watch the episode featuring a 2009 opinion poll by the Levada Centre on the sixth wave of Russian emigration. Answer the questions: Why are Russians leaving now? What causes frustration and anxiety in the life? Who would like to leave Russia to live elsewhere? Find out more information about the late poll on the same issue. Has the percentage of Russians who say they want to leave the country dropped or risen? Practice and test yourself on ordinal and cardinal numbers.
While Gerard Depardieu was attracted to Russia for its 13 percent flat tax rate, more and more middle-class Russians want to leave not for the sake of material benefits (or to be precise, they are not doing this just for the sake of the money). Interestingly, they still really do not want to leave. Just in Russia, according to the Levada Centre, three-quarters of Russians do not plan more than two years ahead, and only 3% plan more than ten years ahead. Not many Russian businessmen plan to pass their businesses on to their offspring, since most parents send their children abroad not to learn to run their businesses more efficiently, but so they never have to come back.
Those who left in the first two waves in the early 20th century feared revolution and instability, impoverishment or unemployment. The recent fifth wave of emigration followed the Soviet collapse in the 1990s was the mainly economically motivated. Now those who want to go abroad often have higher material standards of living than their peers in the West. (The survey was conducted among people aged 25-39 living in large cities and earning five-to-ten times the average income in Russia.) However the discontent with the rhetoric that is far removed from reality, lack of property rights, the humiliation of being milked by bureaucrats, frustration with the unfairness of the system make a growing number of urban and well-educated Russians eager to leave. They want to leave because they feel anxiety that rooted in the realization that nothing will change, improve or open up in Russia in the nearest future.