Professor Tomila V. Lankina
About me
I am a Professor of Politics and International Relations at the LSE’s International Relations Department.
I am presently working on a book about the history of Russian dissent. To Live For Freedom: A History of Dissent in Russia, will be my first book for the general reader and will be published by Penguin Press in the UK and Public Affairs in the US.
You can find a concise summary of my latest completed research -- book, APSR paper and district-level historical data for Russia now on APSR Dataverse -- in my BROADSTREET historical political economy blog post here.
Watch here the 5-minute video about the book Estate Origins just out with Cambridge University Press.
A more extended 30 minute tour of main ideas in my book is available from the video here.
And here is the link to the LSE Research for the World blog about how the social outcomes of the Bolshevik Revolution challenge present-day economistic prescriptions about levelling society.
My book, which explores these themes, has won the following awards:
Winner of the 2023 J. David Greenstone Prize for the best book in the Politics and History section of the American Political Science Association. The award recognizes the best book in history and politics in the past two calendar years.
Winner of the 2023 Davis Center Book Prize. The prize, sponsored by Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, is awarded annually by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology, or geography in the previous calendar year.
Recipient of “Honorable Mention” for the Sartori Book Award of the American Political Science Association Organized Section for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research. This award honors Giovanni Sartori's work on qualitative methods and concept formation, and especially his contribution to helping scholars think about problems of context as they refine concepts and apply them to new spatial and temporal settings.
My background has strongly informed the ideas and research focus of my work, particularly the latest book. The book and earlier papers that I am presenting on this website form an academic project. But the thoughts and framework reflect observations about the countries and cultures I have immersed myself in, simultaneously as a native and outside observer—Uzbekistan, India, Russia, Ukraine, Germany, America, and Britain. Their social structures are different, but everywhere I lived I found similarities in how the various nations produce the elite and the insiders, the marginals, and the outsiders. These patterns transcend watershed events—revolutions, independence movements, the fall of colonialism, and wars. I find naïve the recent “rock star” economist solutions for how to deal with intractable inequalities and injustices. You will discern this scepticism in my book—and more. It diverges from materialist angles on class; I dissect the more substantive inequalities going beyond the factor of “offshore havens” and “executive pay” and delving deeper into the inner logics of societal preservation, robustness, and resilience. Read more about my background in this section.
My book on the Russian bourgeoisie
My book explains post-communist Russia’s social stratification and, relatedly, democratic fortunes with reference to social structure predating communism. I locate the genesis of the bourgeoisie-cum-middle class, conventionally regarded as broadly supportive of democratic institutions, in the estate system of Imperial Russia which distinguished between the nobility, clergy, the urban estates of merchants and meshchane, and peasants. Estate—its juridical, material and symbolic aspects—simultaneously facilitated the gelling of a highly educated, institutionally incorporated autonomous bourgeoisie and professional stratum, and social and inter-regional inequalities that persisted through the communist period and have plagued subsequent democratic consolidation.
When the Bolsheviks took power, in developed provinces, not to mention the core metropolitan centres, they did not merely encounter a “bourgeoisie” as an abstract class category, but as an institutional fact more characteristic of C. Wright Mills’ modern western organizational society than one of the halcyon days of the country gentleman, the small farmer, and family business entrepreneur. Axing the imperial police or ministries and their regional branches associated with core sites of Imperial rule would alter, but not shatter, other institutional-bureaucratic arenas and cognate ties. For the bourgeoisie incorporated into modern professional, civic, and advocacy institutions, enjoyed both the tangible bureaucratic, and the symbolic, foundations of social distinction vis-à-vis other groups in society. Indeed, it also retained a quasi-autonomous stature in relation to the state. These institutional artefacts of modernization of the estate-layered Imperial society, I argue, constitute the main drivers of within- and inter-regional variations in communist and post-communist social, economic, and political development.
Read more about the book in this section.
Image credit: Constantine Neklutin collection, Cammie G. Henry Research Center at Northwestern State University of Louisiana.