Putin has as well a holy war against the middle class of Russia:
Japanese company Toshiba is closing its Russian division for television sets and kitchen appliances Toshiba CIS, Kommersant newspaper reported Monday, according to Russian news agency TASS.
“We have completely left the Russian consumer market. We have sold all the goods as early as last December, when there was a peak of sales, Toshiba Rus Director Hiroaki Tezuka told the newspaper.
Read more on UNIAN: http://www.unian.info/economics/1211283-toshiba-leaves-russian-tv-and-kitchen-appliances-market-media.html
In reporting these figures today, Aleksey Golyakov of “Novyye izvestiya” points out that this figure is based on the minimum income that the government estimates is needed maintaining a decent standard of living and the actual incomes of Russians
This shift is widely recognized by Russians: a VTsIOM poll found that two-thirds of them say that “over the last five years, the number of poor in the country has risen,” with over 40 percent saying this is incompatible with Russia's constitutional claim to be a social state.
Commenting on the results, Yevgeny Gontmakher, the deputy director of IMEMO, says that the Putin regime has behaved in such a way that it has been making the situation worse. At a time of crisis, most governments spend more on social needs in order to protect “the most valuable thing of all - human capital.”
But the current Russian regime has cut spending on health, education, and other social needs in order to boost spending on the force structures and the bureaucracy. Unless that changes, the share of Russians under the poverty line will continue to rise - and the share of Russians who see this as a problem will continue to increase.
http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.se/2015/12/two-million-more-russians-fall-into.html
Russia's middle class: We don't blame Putin
From the article:
And for middle class it's important to feel that you are a citizen of a very important country."
The sentiment mentioned above shows that they don't want to settle for being just another country in exchange for more food on the table. Different tolerance for economic hardship.