Total unemployment Russia EU and Ukraine

The relatively egalitarian situation in the Soviet Union changed dramatically in the early 1990s, as economic reforms turned the planned economy into a capitalist free market. Worsened by the recession at the time, unemployment increased sharply. Since 2000, growth and reforms in the labour market halved unemployment from 10.58 % in 2000 to 4.5 % in 2019; in 2020 the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic pushed it to 5.2 % (see Figure 3). Even after 2014, most Russian employers responded to the then financial crisis by cutting wages rather than laying workers off. As a result, the effect on income was spread more or less equally across all employees, rather than being concentrated among those who lost their jobs.