Editor's Introduction

Abstract

This month we have three articles that deal with post-Soviet society and one that looks back to the Soviet period. In the roundtable discussion on "The Dynamics of Social Structure and the Transformation of the Public Mind," the focus is on such issues as the direction and rate of change of social structure, the extent to which one may legitimately speak of a new structure already being in place, how identities are changing and the effect they may have on public opinion, and the extent to which social conflict and protest are occurring. Although these are topics of much discussion in Russia today, Golenkova points out that there is as yet little understanding of the extent to which the changes are due to external factors (such as globalization), to factors associated with moving from one system to another, or to factors that are intrinsically Russian in nature. Most of the participants agree that material inequalities are the most important conditioning factors for social structure and that this is also the basis for conflicts. As Kozyreva notes, "we can estimate that somewhere between 35 percent and more than 50 percent of Russians today think dial their basic survival needs are met wholly or primarily through confrontation." Research data also show that one's position on the "wealth-poverty continuum" strongly influences the degree of liberalism on social and economic issues; thus, the poorer one is, the less liberal. The future of Russia, though, may depend more on those in the middle than on those at either extreme of the continuum, a point raised by Gordon when he talks about the contradictory situation in which people in this group find themselves. Thus, "some aspects of the lives of most of its representatives are quite agreeable, while others are very bad, some are improving, and still others are worsening. Some of its members are gradually falling into the poor group, but many others are beginning to accumulate possessions and savings and stand on their own two feet. Ultimately, much depends precisely on this group." Much of the complexity stems from the fact that current society is a mixture of old and new patterns. As Beliaeva argues, "the old mechanism of state distribution has collapsed. New principles of distribution have not yet been developed, nor has a new socioeconomic structure been formed. What we could call market relations in the Western sense of the term are emerging only in certain segments, and even those are very unstable." In summing up the results of the roundtable, Galkin notes that the prevailing evidence shows that "Russia's present social structure is developing not so much through the replacement of old structural elements by new ones but in a much more complicated way, as a result of the imposition of one structure on another, with their concurrent interaction and opposition. This is the source of the instability, amorphousness, and fragmentary nature that the discussants mentioned. Clearly, the emerging social structure will not coincide with the structure of developed countries, even if and when it acquires more definite and stable forms. Russian social policy should be based on this and not on models borrowed from outside."