The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle Class by Tomila Lankina

Abstract

Histories of Russia focus almost exclusively on discontinuities—the “Time of Troubles” in the sixteenth century, the Emancipation Act of 1861, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Such emphases have reinforced a general view of Russian society as perpetually lurching from crisis to crisis. There is certainly value in the study of Russian upheaval; episodes of instability can shed light on larger questions about social and political organization in the past. But, according to Lankina, the (often overlooked) continuities across ruptures can teach us at least as much, as is borne out by the findings of her ambitious new study of the Russian middle class.In this book, Lankina investigates the reproduction of Russia’s small but (as she shows) constant bourgeois stratum from the imperial era, across the turmoil and upheaval of the twentieth century, to the post-Soviet present day. She is interested in the transmission of values across generations and the implications of this phenomenon for social, political, and economic development. Can we connect those estates (socio-legal groups, or soslovii in Russian) associated with “bourgeois” values in the imperial period to the Soviet intelligentsia in the twentieth century, and further, to groups with more positive views of democratic reforms in Russia today? And can we draw any larger lessons from the Russian case?These are, as Lankina herself acknowledges, big, complicated, and difficult questions to answer; refreshingly, she approaches them as such. Instead of reducing the problem to one narrow question that she can address using data alone, she takes a truly interdisciplinary approach, consulting literatures and methodologies from a range of fields, including history, sociology, and quantitative political science. She uses both textual and quantitative evidence and formulates her hypotheses in relation to a broad range of disciplinary concepts from Weber’s notion of the Ständestaat and Bourdieu’s idea of “cultural capital” to de Vries’ “industrious revolution” and Piketty’s recent work on inequality.1Lankina moves comfortably between micro-history and statistical analysis, between a local archive filled with textual sources and large data sets. She quickly introduces us to a local community in Samara province in the nineteenth century, the fortunes of which she follows across generations. These people’s actions and words—the way in which they perceived their social identity and values and the choices that they made—provide a context for interpreting the statistical findings in later chapters. Similarly, Lankina finds interesting ways to use data to address the issue of long-run social reproduction. Connecting estate membership to professions and educational indicators in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods—along with other proxies for characteristics associated with bourgeois estates—she makes the case for much greater “intergenerational resilience” than the existing literature about Russia implies. Thus, she casts doubt on the idea that the so-called “Soviet experiment” succeeded in leveling the old estate hierarchies. In fact, she argues that the correlations between educational groups and democratic preferences that emerge from the contemporary data are surprisingly consistent with indicators for the imperial period. Hence, rather than breaking down imperial social identities, the turmoil of the Soviet years may have bolstered and reinforced them, at least among members of the middling estates studied in this book.Ever aware of the limitations of her sources and the ambitious pioneering nature of her project, Lankina places most of her emphasis on the questions raised by her findings and their significance to broader inquiries about persistent inequality and the role of human capital and social identity in creating long-run intergenerational resilience. In a world of increasingly specialized research, Lankina reminds us of the value of interdisciplinary approaches, showing how they can shed new light on our most challenging contemporary problems.