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My book suggests that we ought to pay greater attention to social processes unleashed at junctures during which late feudal societies transition to modern citizenship. The feudal institution of estate in Russia divided citizens into nobles, clergy, the urban categories of merchants, artisans and meshchane, and peasant subjects. It not only inequitably structured property rights, taxation, educational access, and personal freedoms in Europe’s “backward” periphery, but also possibilities for a smooth transition into modern human capital intensive, organizationally incorporated, status positions. As states shed the vestiges of feudalism, some simultaneously set up universal mass schooling, while others like Russia do not. It is at this juncture that the habitually educated aristocrat, the clergyman, the artisan, possess an “early riser” advantage—becoming the professional, the modern entrepreneur, the purveyor of the arts—leaving the unschooled peasant-turned industrial labourer or precariat far behind.
The book discusses these processes as important for understanding the genesis of what I term bimodal societies whether they feature legacies of communism or not. In such polities, a chasm continues to cleave the modern professionally-incorporated groups from others; and the middle class, conventionally bracketed under one generic umbrella, is of a two-pronged nature—one prong originating in the educated estates of feudal, caste-like, societies and another, rapidly fabricated as part of state catch up in communist and other late developing states.
To make this case, I assembled a district-level dataset covering the entire territory of Russia and spanning three epochs and regimes—Tsarist-Imperial, communist, and post-communist, with fine-grained census occupational, demographic, socio-economic data; voting statistics to the national parliaments before the Revolution and in post-communist Russia; and micro-survey data—the first of its kind in which Levada, Russia’s leading polling agency, asked citizens to identify their estate ancestry. I worked with other collaborators pooling data, ideas, and resources. Working papers and research already published provide a flavour of some of the analysis and ideas. The cross-sectional data are complemented with formal social network analysis encompassing roughly 4,000 members of white-collar professional, entrepreneurial, civic, and managerial stratum right before the Revolution in a rapidly developing city on the Volga, and looser analytical methods deploying materials that I gathered—public and private archival papers, letters, memoirs, and personal interview/ oral history records. The bourgeois society, I find, came to check the Bolsheviks’ levelling policies. Via mechanisms of intergenerational human capital and professional-dynastic status transfer, social closure, and, crucially, embeddedness in long-established modern professional-associational sites, it become in many ways a society onto itself.
Further, cataclysmic events like revolutions with their fast-based tempo, simultaneity of calamities, and intrinsic immediate threats to legitimacy of the new order—whatever the revolutionaries’ intentions—have a built in socially dis-levelling dimension, I argue. In what is morbidly reminiscent of the world of Covid-19 now, epidemics, disease, and famine incentivised tactical reliance on the old professional. Even repressions are dissected from the perspective of the relentlessly appropriative logic of Bolshevik policy—for data analysis reveals reliance on established pre-Revolutionary industrial and R&D hubs to service the vast Gulag archipelago, but also a modicum of privilege for the high-human capital groups within the penal economy of coercive institutions.
The project backgrounds, but does not neglect, material aspects of social structure. New archival data on remittances and transnational ties of merchant-meshchane families that I assembled allow me to extend within-region social network analysis to include the globalization of networks as value reaffirming, not value-shattering, and as a window into the hedging between shadow market practices and open public sector pursuits—at the height of Stalinism and onwards.
The merchant-engineer or the museum custodian, the meshchanin-rentier-turned schoolteacher, the clergyman-veterinarian, the shadow entrepreneur, come alive in my book, along with the nuances of their occupational navigation, professional incorporation, and social bonding with others from estatist society. These groups—the estates-based precursors to the modern knowledge-embracing privileged segment of professionals and entrepreneurs, the bulk of the would-be middle class—have been obscured behind the fog of communist-Marxist class jargon and the preoccupation with the new elite of party functionaries (not the focus of my book) of many Western scholars, historians and social scientists alike. While we have studies of the spectacular social mobility of the “proletariat,” works on generic metropolitan “intelligentsia,” and on the horrific persecutions of the aristocracy and peasantry, the bulk of Russia’s estates-derived professional society—or bourgeoisie if we deploy conventional class terms—has been neglected. It is thus that we know almost nothing of the communist reincarnation of the merchant, the clergyman, and the meshchanin.
I also extend insights from analysis of Russia to pursue a macro-historical comparison of several national cases and ask questions like: Why does the old bourgeoisie survive in some communist states and not others? And what role do these varieties of communism have for understanding political regime outcomes in these societies now? A structured comparison of China, Hungary, and Russia reveals that where before communism the feudal “educated” estates were already successfully establishing, expanding, and colonizing the modern professions and other knowledge-intensive, institutionally incorporated spheres, the bourgeoisie survived communist levelling policies and continues to check illiberal tendencies in communist legacy regimes now. Where the feudal society had not yet transitioned to professional modernity, as in China, in contrast to Hungary and Russia, communist regimes were successful at far more draconian levelling policies. The result is a far greater bifurcation in countries like Russia and Hungary between a new and an old middle class-bourgeoisie. And, where feudalism-shattering reforms were accompanied by rolling out of universal schooling as in Hungary, but not in Russia and China, post-communism will be of an illiberal society, not consolidated autocracy, variety.
My analysis shifts the analytical lens in paradigmatic accounts of the origin of inequalities and democracy from terms like “lord,” “peasant,” “capitalist,” to those more appropriate as leading markers of both inequality and political orientation in present-day unequal, knowledge privileging societies—embodied in what I term the institutionally-incorporated professional. The professions, not classes in a Marxist sense, society, not capital, constitute the focus of my book.
Cambridge University Press, 2022
Image credit: Constantine Neklutin collection, Cammie G. Henry Research Center at Northwestern State University of Louisiana.