Sources and Mechanisms of Persisting Social Inequality in Russia: Attending to the Blind Spot

Abstract

An original, empirically rich, and analytically multilayered and provocative statement by Tomila Lankina, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia (2022) is a meticulous work of sociology focused on the exploration and elaboration of social mechanisms of resilience in a transforming polity and society. It is also an attempt to link the past, the 19th-century reform of the estate system in Russia, to the present, Russia’s failed democratization, by arguing that the social basis for democracy in postcommunist Russia was associated with the thin stratum of the more privileged, educated, and politically engaged members of the middle class who were able to build on the intergenerational capital and became “the silent custodian of institutions and values that nurtured the democratic promise of post-communism” (391). As such, it is a passionate statement against Soviet historiography that has been influential in shaping the mainstream Western understanding about the socially transformative nature of communism. The book goes against the received wisdom about the degree to which the Soviet society has been modernized and transformed through communist experience: “the narratives of grand revolutionary rupture,” as Lankina phrases it (394). Excavating specific family histories, Lankina shines light “on the ‘tectonic’ layers of skills, values, and occupational complexity” that underlay wealth-supporting strategies along with the pursuit of better education and the acquisition of better-paid jobs in the Soviet Union. The already privileged social groups—the urban and rural meshchane—were better “connected, networked and engaged” and therefore better-equipped “with the skills, tools, and capital” (393). The Soviet regime reincorporated these privileged professional groups into an elite layer (prosloyka) of the Soviet society, commonly known as Soviet intelligentsia.