Reuters Konstantin owns apartments in Moscow and London, drives a $150,000 Mercedes-Benz car and buys his groceries at the expensive Azbuka Vkusa store. At the age of 44 he is part of Russia's new generation of rich bankers, but is too cautious to let his full name be published in a country where the wealth gap generates anger and resentment. Pensioner Lyudmila Rybakova can only dream of such a lifestyle. She has never even been to Azbuka Vkusa and makes ends meet by selling strings of dried mushrooms to supplement her 8,000 rouble ($250) monthly pension. “With my pension? What would I buy there? It's not for people like me. It's for the rich, it's just for the rich.” The gap between rich and poor in Russia is a growing problem for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as he prepares to return to the presidency in an election next March. During his 12-year rule, as president and then prime minister, Russians have broadly speaking become wealthier than they were in the chaotic years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the citizen of Putin's Russia can easily lose even a modest sense of well being when confronted with the sometimes flambuoyant ostentation of the rich. In Soviet times privilege was often a well guarded secret. Many people cited the wealth gap in ditching Putin's ruling party in a Dec. 4 election that cut its majority in parliament. The election also touched off protests by demonstrators who say the vote was slanted to favor United Russia and demand a rerun. There will be no rerun, but the March presidential election could push the same issues to the fore. If a gap has widened between individuals, it is also evident between Russia's many poor regions and wealthy cities like Moscow and the booming oil heartland. Real disposable income has slightly declined this year, official data show, and the difference in income between the bottom 10 percent of the population and the top 10 percent grew by nearly one-fifth between 2000 and 2010. As in other former Soviet republics, pensioners are among the worst off because they were too old to make the most of the opportunities offered by the free market that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Moscow is home to 2.65 million retired people and some elderly people have taken part in the recent protests, although many more are young middle
