The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia

Abstract

A devastating challenge to the idea of communism as a 'great leveller', this extraordinarily original, rigorous, and ambitious book debunks Marxism-inspired accounts of its equalitarian consequences. It is the first study systematically to link the genesis of the 'bourgeoisie-cum-middle class' – Imperial, Soviet, and post-communist – to Tzarist estate institutions which distinguished between nobility, clergy, the urban merchants and meshchane, and peasants. It demonstrates how the pre-communist bourgeoisie, particularly the merchant and urban commercial strata but also the high human capital aristocracy and clergy, survived and adapted in Soviet Russia. Under both Tzarism and communism, the estate system engendered an educated, autonomous bourgeoisie and professional class, along with an oppositional public sphere, and persistent social cleavages that continue to plague democratic consensus. This book also shows how the middle class, conventionally bracketed under one generic umbrella, is often two-pronged in nature – one originating among the educated estates of feudal orders, and the other fabricated as part of state-induced modernization.

Autoeficacia, corrupción administrativa y corrupción política

“…Y no les faltará razón, toda vez que superó, en mucho, al más grande de los Romanov. Por lo demás el brillante trabajo de (Lankina, 2021) sufre de otra predación intelectual: la democracia reposa en las clases medias y en el extremo centro. Y esto es tal cual, rigurosamente falso: las clases medias con perfectamente compatibles con un estado autoritario y no solo porque dependan del Estado (Rosenfeld, 2020), como bien hemos sabido en España.…”

“…El capital cultural 30 , susceptible de traducirse en capital social y económico, es tan resiliente que parece capaz de sobrevivir a los regímenes "reeducadores más severos" 31 . Los mecanismos por los cuales esa transmisión se produce -excluyendo el puramente genético-parece que tienen que ver con la familia 32 , si bien la presencia de otras instituciones como las iglesias, han sido igualmente señaladas (aunque más bien como elemento de transmitir ideología y lealtades de clase, que capital cultural en sentido estricto 33 ) En una adicción interesante (Lankina, 2021) analiza cómo funcionan esos mecanismos -camuflaje incluido-para preservar y transmitir ese capital inter generacionalmente 34 , incluso en regímenes "ferozmente" igualitarios. Pareciera por tanto que la reproducción de los privilegios puede encontrarse en todas las sociedades, sin que las "sociedades modernas" difieran mucho de las premodernas (Clark, 2014): los ratios de movilidad son bajos, no varían mucho entre sociedades y son resistentes a las políticas sociales que quieren promover la igualdad de oportunidades.…”

Who Supports the War? And Who Protests? The Legacies of Tzarist Social Divide in Russia

“…An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Workshop on Political Ethnography of the State in the Post-Soviet Contexts, held on December 9-10, 2022, at the East European and Eurasian Studies Program of the Yale MacMillan Center, New Haven. This essay also develops some of the themes I discussed in my new book on the Russian social divisions and support for democracy/autocracy [1]. I also draw on my contribution to the special issue of the journal Post-Soviet Affairs that I guest edited, on the logic of 'fractals' in Russian studies [2].…”

“…In May 2022 Ukraine held the first trial for war crimes in Russia's current war on Ukraine. 1 The accused was Vadim Shishimarin, a 21-year-old Russian army sergeant charged with shooting and killing a 62-year-old unarmed Ukrainian civilian. In the media, almost all of the attention was on the crime and its punishment.…”

“…And these legacies affected how the various groups would be positioned in the Soviet class system and how they would fare in the circumstances of the market transition of the 1990s. Just like under the tzars, Russian society remains divided between a tiny minority of dynastically educated intelligentsia who are able to access high-status professions that are insulated from state pressures to conform to the regime line, and the economically vulnerable -and poorly educated -majority [31]. This is the background to the story of the majority supporting Putin or those unable to challenge the autocracy and of those vulnerable to his propaganda, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the tiny minority of active dissenters.…”