The three selections in this issue of the Russian Social Science Review offer historical perspectives on some of the starts and stops in the emergence of middle classes in Russia. Lidiia V. Koshman's article on the meshchanstvo in nineteenth-century Russia describes a little-studied urban lower-middle stratum of petty traders, clerks, artisans, and servants, and the ways that tsarist policies of taxation, education access, and control tended to smother any dynamism in what might have been a proto–middle class. Next, Valentin V. Shelokhaev offers a survey of the policies championed, but not successfully implemented, by Petr Stolypin, Russia's prime minister from 1906 to1911—controversial in his time and reviled during the Soviet years, but reportedly much admired by Vladimir Putin. Stolypin's initiatives were intended to free the “incipient individual” by removing barriers to property ownership, social mobility, and education, with the strategic purpose of forming a middle class that would modernize, stabilize, and strengthen autocratic Russia. Finally, Irina V. Glushchenko writes about the massive Soviet public education and propaganda campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s and what was called “the offensive against illiteracy and the lack of culture.” We will sample studies of the contemporary Russian middle class in future issues.
—P.A.K.