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ABSTRACT
An occasion for discussing the 25th anniversary of the socioeconomic development of post-Soviet Russia is the publication of a collective monograph edited by O. Shkaratan and G. Yastrebov, titled How New Is the New Russia? Its conceptual and polemical nature is clearly indicated by the title. The authors answer this question in the negative. No, contemporary Russia continues to reproduce the same basic institutions of power-property, firmly rooted in Russian civilization going back to the 13th century. In the new book, the influence of previous “oriental-despotic” development is considered in terms of the social structure and dynamics of contemporary Russian society, which the authors of the monograph describe as a neo-etacracy. The overall analytic result produced by the study is complex. The idea inherent in the book’s title is fully realized. The book shows that the old “rules of the game” continue to operate in the new Russia even after the “death” of the Soviet Union: The reproduction of power-property is conceptually substantiated, and the connection between the development of the mechanisms of social mobility and social polarization is empirically corroborated. However, the goal of connecting the reproduction of power-property with the empirical data on social life in post-Soviet Russia is more ambiguous. The book has a number of new arguments supporting the idea that in Russia the “state is still stronger than society.” One of the most original and well-designed concerns a survey question about which patients would receive preferential treatment in a hospital. However, there remains a lack of comprehensive evidence. This is primarily because the book is based on sociological research done with “ordinary people” and largely excludes the representatives of the “state-class.”
Notes
1 Epigraph source: “[T]his one lacked conscience; that one, sense;/on all of them were different fetters;/and outworn was the old, and the new raved/about the old.” Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, ch. I, st. 44, tr. Vladimir Nabokov. (Available at http://nabokov-lit.ru/nabokov/stihi/eugene-onegin/onegin-1.htm; accessed on November 15, 2019.)—Trans.
In the in-text citations and references, How New Is the New Russia? is transliterated as Nova li novaia Rossiia?—Trans.
2 Strictly speaking, there is still much debate about the French Revolution: Some consider it a popular movement, and others believe it to be the result of a Masonic conspiracy.
3 For example, if convergence with the West is quite pronounced in Confucian civilization countries, in Islamic civilization countries this trend is much weaker. (Even Turkey, which has deliberately pursued a catch-up model of development for over two centuries, still retains its authoritarian and statist institutions.)
4 How New Is the New Russia? emphasizes the distinction formed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries between the “hordelike rule” of North-Eastern Russia and the “prince-boyar model” in southwestern Russia, which gravitated toward European feudalism [p. 108].
5 Perhaps the most successful comprehensive analysis of post-Soviet Russia based on power-property theory is still the work of R.M. Nureev’s Virtual Workshop, which published Ekonomicheskie sub”ekty postsovetskoi Rossii (institutsional’nyi analiz) (2003). We note that the workshop’s research was conducted in the early 2000s, when the post-Yeltsin “reversal” was not as prominent. However, participants in the Virtual Workshop drew attention to the fact that the reproduction of power-property also occurred in the 1990s, despite the official dominance of liberal slogans.
6 Coined by Robert K. Merton in 1968, the Matthew effect is used by sociologists to explain the rise of income inequality during the development of society: “For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”
7 “We have shown that the Russian societal system has developed a unique type of social stratification, which combines the still dominant caste hierarchy (in which the positions of individuals and social groups are determined by their place in the power structure, which is determined according to formal ranks and related privileges) and elements of class differentiation based on the ownership of property and the positions held in the labor market” [Nova li novaia Rossiia?, p. 10].
8 According to the Cheddock scale, correlations with a coefficient below 0.3 are considered weak (below 0.2— negligible), and between 0.3 and 0.5—moderate.
9 The possession of knowledge is better determined by the informal tendency of reading and theater attendance than the formal acquisition of a college degree. However, theater/museum attendance and a large personal library can be elements of prestigious consumption (which includes graduate degrees), regardless of the cultural and educational level of the consumer. In addition, it is striking that the indicators of cultural capital are formulated somewhat artificially: Today, more and more adults go online to read books and watch films/plays.
10 “The data of representative polls do not cover the whole picture, since representatives of the ‘social lower classes’ and ‘social upper classes’ are the most difficult to access when collecting sociological information” [Nova li novaia Rossiia?, 2016, p. 166].
11 A striking example of a researcher’s “fate” to study hypotheticals and the inability to refer to empirical data is the study on the problem of political investment [Barsukova and Zviagintsev, Citation2006]. Nevertheless, despite the empirical limitations of this approach, interesting analytic results can be produced [Pliskevich, Citation2015].
12 For comparison, racial discrimination in the United States is not determined by how many whites would approve of their daughter marring a black man, but by how many do not understand why skin color plays a role in creating a family.
13 Real-life evidence in this case could be found in a medical database, which would show, ceteris paribus, whether government officials received better care than entrepreneurs and ordinary workers. However, the lack of access to such databases currently makes such an approach unrealistic.
14 In countries with authoritarian cultures an effective way of encouraging creativity (as has been clearly demonstrated in Japanese quality circles) is not to rely on individual but on group (“artel”) activity [see Latova, Citation2017]. Therefore, the complaints of Western professionals about the low creativity of Russians largely reflect the Western focus on personal success and not the Russian “habit of sticking to templates.”
15 One chapter of the monograph, written by the British sociologist D. Lane, focuses on the comparative approach. The chapter indicates that the transformative processes in post-socialist countries have converged, not entirely successfully, on neoliberal ideology. Lane’s criticism of a stereotypical adherence to neoliberalism is conceptually different from Shkaratan’s criticism of a reliance on the “Asian” path of development.