Revisiting the historical trend of educational stratification in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia

Abstract

Previous research found that social inequality in educational attainment in Russia was invariant to the changes in the socio-political and economic context. It was a striking conclusion when judged against the narratives of the educational policy reforms, the demographic change, and the radical regime change in the early 1990s, all of which suggest that inequalities may have been affected to a non-trivial extent. We hypothesize that the failure to identify corresponding changes has to do with an insufficiently small statistical power of previous analyses and specific inference strategies. By pooling and analyzing relevant harmonizable data from multiple sources, we identify previously overlooked details in the long-term trend of inequality of educational opportunity in Russia, such as (a) a heightened level of inequality in the cohorts that received education during Stalin’s era; (b) some success of Khrushchev’s reforms that aimed to equalize access to higher education by introducing mechanisms (e.g., university quotas) explicitly favoring students with the rural and working-class origin; (c) the return towards more elitist trends following the reversal of Khrushchev’s reforms during Brezhnev’s era; (d) modest equalization in the final phase of state socialism under Gorbachev sustained until the first years after market transition in the 1990s. As far as the general trend is concerned, we find that inequality continuously declined from the early Soviet cohorts to the post-Soviet ones, which seems to be consistent with the theoretical and empirical arguments that link educational expansion to the equalization of educational opportunity.