THE FIGURES SEEMED TO GIVE REASON FOR OPTIMISM. For the first time in nine years the rate of officially registered unemployment in Russia significantly decreased in 19991 and stayed downward bound in 2000.2 More than one million fewer people claiming from the social insurance fund at the end of the century seemed to be clear proof for post-Soviet politicians that their policies were right and that no further basic measures for the Russian labour market were needed.3 As in Soviet times though, official figures in Russia still have to be taken with care. Recorded by the Russian employment service itself,4 all that they show is the number of people who are found qualified for the status of being unemployed. The difference between the numbers of officially registered unemployed and of those unemployed by ILO standards reached 6.5 times in 1999. In some regions of the Russian Federation the numbers of registered unemployed differ so much from the numbers of unemployed by ILO standards that administrative categories look completely different depending on the way unemployment is counted.5 While the number of registered unemployed for a long time was said to hover around 1%6 and then rose only slowly throughout the 1990s, the ILO figure7 has tripled since 1992 and reached the level of 9.1 million or 12.4% of the Russian workforce in 1999,8 which clearly indicates that, despite official statistics, unemployment in Russia is by no means declining. What politicians thought to be the turning point in a long downward trend in the post-Soviet demand for labour in fact tells us more about the complexity of the post-Soviet labour situation and the problems of determining the actual level of unemployment in Russia than about the effects of Russian social policy.9 Far from being consolidated, the Russian labour market today is a result of a wide plurality of intertwined factors that make it impossible to ascribe the present situation to a small number of coherent reasons. In order to discuss the labour situation in Russia more precisely, I will try to disentangle some of these factors in the following exposition.