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Notes
1. This article is adapted from a paper delivered at the Seventeenth International Conference on Economic and Social Development, Moscow: National Research University Higher School of Economics, April 19–22, 2016. I would like to thank E. Kochergina for her assistance in preparing the article.
2. See the typical “dialectical” game of “Us,” which makes it possible to join researchers and the top leadership but to distance themselves from lower-level “officials” and politicians: “Most of the middle class today is poor.” Interview with M. Gorshkov, director of RAS Institute of Sociology, in the magazine Kommersant-Den’gi, April 4, 2016, no. 13 (1071), pp. 15–17.
3. I would highlight here the writings of T.I. Zaslavskaia, O.I. Shkaratan, N.E. Tikhonova, T.M. Maleva, and L.N. Ovcharova, who have done a great deal to describe the social structure of Russian society. An early monograph by V.V. Radaev and O.I. Shkaratan, Sotsial’naia stratifikatsiia (Moscow: Aspekt Press, 1996), was and remains very useful for familiarizing the Russian public with various approaches to the study of social stratification.
4. The monographs of N.E. Tikhonova are an example of such meticulous and sound work. See: Tikhonova, N.E. Sotsial’naia stratifikatsiia sovremennoi Rossii: opyt empiricheskogo analiza. Moscow: In-t sotsiologii RAN, 2007; Tikhonova, N.E. Sotsial’naia struktura Rossii: teorii i real’nost’. Moscow: In-t sotsiologii RAN; Novyi khronograf, 2014; as well as anthologies of articles of the RAS Institute of Sociology prepared together with M. Gorshkov.
5. See: Konstantinova, O. “Dinamika statusnykh samootsenok naseleniia Rossii v 1994–2011,” Vestnik obshchestvennogo mneniia, 2012, nos. 3–4 (113), pp. 186–195.
6. One exception of a kind is the recent round-table debate at the Liberal’naia Missiia [Liberal Mission] Foundation regarding the book by Daron Adzhemoglu [Acemoglu] and James Robinson, Pochemu odni strany bogatye, a drugie bednye, Proiskhozhdenie vlasti, protsvetaniia i nishchety [Original title: Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty]. Moscow: Liberal’naia missiia, 2015.—http://www.liberal.ru/articles/7049.
7. A formulation of such questions was presented, for example, in S.M. Lipset’s book Politicheskii chelovek [Original title: Political Man], which was recently (February 29, 2016) the subject of a discussion at a Liberal’naia Missiia seminar.—http://www.liberal.ru/articles/7036.
8. The illusion of a successful transition was maintained in the 2000s by the steady growth of real per capita income (6–8 percent a year from 2002 through 2008; after the crisis of 2009–2010 this growth resumed in 2011–2012). The current regime’s conservative ideology of self-preservation was largely justified by the policy of growth for the middle class, which Kremlin political strategists viewed as a guarantor of “stability” in the country. What was crafty about this premise was that the middle class was growing as a result of the expansion of the public sector and of social groups dependent on the government. The mass protest demonstrations of 2011–2013 smashed the illusions of the government’s stability, which led to a sharp tightening of domestic policies, an increase in repressions against opponents and independent organizations of civil society, the establishment of censorship and monopolistic control of the news media, the electoral process, the judiciary, and so forth. The wave of patriotic mobilization and growing confrontation with the developed Western countries, which provided a consolidation of the populace with the government, eliminated once and for all the question of the middle class as a conceptual problem of the development of society and a factor in evolutionary change. It is not merely the fact of “middleness” in the attempts to establish a social-structure identity but also the very scale of support of the country’s leadership that point to the disappearance of all characteristics of structural differentiation and autonomization of specific segments of society and the weakness of the judiciary as an essential condition of the institutionalization of social pluralism. In the absence of obvious markers of social differentiation (the emergence of formalized large social groups with a clear-cut group self-awareness, identity, and articulation of their interests—and not only purely material interests but also “ideal” interests—the protection of their collective values as distinct from the values of other groups, and hence of the prestige and authority of group members specifically in their capacity as possessors or bearers and representatives of these ideals and aspirations, status, etc.) there can be no doubt about the microsocial and microstatus-related differences within the groups that give rise to a struggle or competition for resources and for recognition by other members (the majority in the group). This is demonstrated by all microsocial studies and group debates.
9. The results of these measurements were presented in a series of articles by L.B. Kosova published between 1994 and 2014 in our journal: Kosova, L. “Predstavleniia o statusnoi dinamike i sotsial’no-politicheskie ustanovki,” Ekonomicheskie i sotsial’nye peremeny: monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniia, 1994, no. 4, pp. 20–22; “Razocharovanie v reformakh v razlichnykh statusnykh gruppakhm,” ibid., 1995, no. 4, pp. 36–37; “Sotsial’nye reformy i dinamika statusov,” ibid., 1997, no. 6, pp. 37–39; “Den’gi ili vlast’? Kanaly mobil’nosti v rossiiskom obshchestve,” ibid., 1999, no. 3(41), pp. 24–26; “Tri mery vremeni, ili Dinamika sub”ektivnykh otsenok statusa,” Vestnik obshchestvennogo mneniia, 2006, no. 2 (82), pp. 25–31; “Obshchestvo nenakopleniia,” ibid., 2009, no. 31 (99), pp. 56–64; “Osnovaniia uspekha: rezul’taty sravnitel’nogo analiza otsenok sub”ektivnogo statusa,” ibid., 2014, nos. 3–4, pp. 118–126. (See also: Krasil’nikova, M. “Sotsial’naia dinamika v perekhodnykh obshchestvakh,” ibid,, 2004, no. 5 (73), pp. 37–47; Krasil’nikova, M. “Dinamika obshchestvennykh statusov za 20 let,” ibid., 2002, no. 5 (73), pp. 33–39).
10. But they also turn out to be the groups most closed off from society, the most loyal to the current government regime.
11. It is important to stress that such fluctuations turn out to be a result not of the market’s influence or of cycles of growth and recession, or of trends in the labor market as in developed countries, but of policy changes and the distributive capabilities of the authorities.
12. The distribution of responses to the question: “On which rung of a 10-rung ladder would you place yourself and your family?” if 1 is the lowest and 10 is the highest.
13. Poor people make up two-thirds of the country’s population. Russians spend more than half of their income on food and are willing to tighten their belts even more. Interview with M. Krasil’nikova in Novaya gazeta, April 20, 2016.—http://www.novayagazeta.ru/economy/72760.html; see also the article by M. Krasil’nikova in this issue of the journal, pp. 86–94.
14. Kuvshinova, O. “Srednii klass v Rossii uvelichivaetsia za schet chinovnikov i silovikov, obnaruzhil Nezavisimyi institut sotsial’noi politiki (NISP),” Vedomosti.ru., April 4, 2013.—www.vedomosti.ru/newsline/news/10766651/strana_chinovnikov. As surveys in the higher status and consumer groups show (more often they are marketing surveys of consumers of a deluxe or expensive product group—cars, suburban country homes, etc.), the new Putin “elite’s” ideological, political, and value-related attitudes and orientations are not very different or virtually not different at all from the mass of the population (not counting a purely extensive increase in consumption parameters—all of the same things, but more expensive). Its members may be called “nouveaux riches,” but in terms of social and anthropological characteristics these people possess just as much of a Soviet mentality (a consciousness that retains all the traumas and hangups of the Soviet shortage-ridden, distribution-oriented economy) as the rest of the population. Their needs and concepts do not go beyond the patrimonialist stereotypes and framework of reality, which is the main problem from the standpoint of the evolution of post-totalitarian Russia. Therefore, an analysis of the social structure does not require including in the examination the context of political processes, changes in basic institutions—the courts, civil society, the secret police—and hence the social and state-related framework of economic processes. The processes of structural and functional differentiation must be evaluated and studied while identifying specialized social groups, their legal and social autonomy, and hence the context of the formation or suppression of the institutional mechanisms of exchange and communications in society, with the mandatory condition that a civil society develops.
15. This point, incidentally, is also made by L.N. Ovcharova in a presentation at the seminar “Seven Lean Years: the Russian Economy on the Threshold of Structural Changes” (Round-table materials edited by K. Rogov. Moscow: Liberal’naia missiia, 2016, p. 57).—http://www.liberal.ru/articles/7035. An analysis of the association between a respondent’s income and social-demographic characteristics brings out two decisive factors that differentiate the social statuses (morphology) of respondents: regional (spatial, urbanistic, geo-economic, etc.) characteristics and their education (mainly whether they received a proper higher education). In essence, this indicates the weakness and fragmentation of Russia’s labor markets, or, to be more precise, the lack of a nationwide labor market, of a common socioeconomic space. Its formation is blocked and suppressed not so much by the low capacity for horizontal mobility by the population (its limited resources) as by the specific structure of administration, the organization of the government and its political interests, which limit the population’s vertical mobility.
16. Weber, M. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie. 5. Aufl., Tübingen, 1972, p. 532. “Classes per se are not communities” (Gemeinschaften—communities, social associations—L.G.). ibid., p. 533. “We may speak of a class when (1) a number of people have in common a specific causal component of their life chances, in so far as (2) this component is represented exclusively by interests in the possession of goods and their acquisition, and (3) is represented under the conditions of the commodity or labor markets (‘class situation’).” Ibid., p. 531.
17. “But always this is the generic connotation of the concept of class: that the kind (die Art) of chance in the market is the decisive moment which presents a common condition for the individual’s fate.” Ibid., p. 532.
18. “Life’s destiny” is an important concept in Weber’s sociology and worldview. In my somewhat free interpretation it denotes an awareness of the lack of alternatives to the institutional and ethical framework of an individual’s behavior and existence, an understanding of the predeterminedness and boundaries of his choice in a concrete, given, i.e., historically generated, action situation. The predeterminedness derives from the individual’s choice of values and behavioral norms. Examples of “destiny” are the growing bureaucratization of modern life, the “battle of the gods” (the unavoidability of human casualties when choosing a certain value-based perspective—a conflict of ethnic, political, moral, economic, and other interests that imbue modern human existence).
19. Ibid., p. 177; see also pp. 532, 538–539. The class struggle only begins, he writes, “with the acquisition” of these opportunities.
20. The problems of social morphology thus lose the characteristics of the usual pyramid. If one needs to provisionally visualize this new concept of the morphology of society somehow, the closest thing would be “a bunch of grapes”—an aggregation of related semantic worlds with their own value-based and normative perspectives, united by common intermediaries of communication—a market, news media, knowledge, education, affective mechanisms (art), etc.
21. A recent example was the mass approval and support of the annexation of Crimea and V. Putin’s entire anti-Western and anti-Ukrainian policies, expressed openly, notwithstanding the clearly recognized negative consequences of these policies not only for the social well-being of Russia as a whole but also specifically for the respondents themselves. It is not a matter merely of fearing possible repressions or, in a weaker form, personal “unpleasantness” for the respondents. There is no reason to doubt the strong collective affects that overcome the populace in such public situations. For example, the majority asserts that the retaliatory Russian sanctions (which are causing greater harm to the well-being of Russians than those originally imposed by the Western countries) should be continued despite the obvious exacerbation of the crisis and the drop in living standards that it has caused.
22. Ibid., p. 28
23. Hence the confusion one often finds among nonsociologist observers who, nevertheless, follow the Levada Center’s releases regarding the radical “contradiction” established in surveys: the unconditional respect for a politician or functionary who holds a high post (a minister, prosecutor general, parliamentary deputy, the president, etc.) combined with a more or less candid conviction about his mendacity, immorality, abuses of authority, involvement in corruption, and other characteristics that are condemned in society.
24. This refers above all to material interests—an effort to increase one’s income or to protect assets and property one already has. Weber separates from economic interests questions regarding rights of group or corporate solidarity, the maintenance of a group’s value and normative system, and intergroup boundaries and barriers, since all these aspects of social relations are sanctioned by other institutions. This very formulation of the question of the structure of society already brings up not only the actual structure of goal-oriented actions (seeking to make a profit or raising the price of hired labor) but also the maintenance of a certain social way of life, which includes models of “necessary” consumption. This in turn requires the establishment of “genetic ties” between value-based concepts that determine the “authoritativeness” of the social status itself (power, prestige, honor, and recognition of dignity regardless of the person who holds it), ideological or religious attitudes, ethics, the framework of political concepts and actions, etc., as well as techniques of socialization, the nature of mobility, and many other factors that predetermine goal-oriented behavior in domains that are viewed as functional, as marking the group (the behavior of capitalist-oriented entrepreneurs, hired workers, state bureaucracy, free intellectuals, etc.).
25. This is what he does, for example, with the concept of “demagogue.” On one hand he defamiliarizes the ancient meaning of the word by applying it to the description of the circumstances of behavior already in non-Greek contexts, using it, say, to describe charismatic leadership—the behavior of ancient Israelite prophets; on the other, he removes from it the negative connotations that characterize modern politics and word usage. Such transformations of the original semantics of words are also common in regular linguistic practice: The word “nobility” originally referred only to a high-level, aristocratic lineage or implied a cloud of meanings related to the behavior of people who are “noble”; over time, however, it lost more and more of its narrow, estate-related meaning (ascriptive character), thereby taking on universalist—“psychological”—characteristics of the proper behavior of a person, evaluated ethically. In this case these behavioral features are regarded as qualities of the specific personality, irrespective of the individual’s lineage—in fact, more the opposite, negating the relationship between virtues and high birth.
26. One might add, serfs or “state-dependent workers” (V. Zaslavskii), like under socialism.
27. The center of Weber’s sociology was the problem of “the fate of Western rationality,” i.e., the unique constellation of various factors and evolutionary circumstances that caused the emergence of the “rational” institutions of modernity—rational (industrial, entrepreneurial) capitalism, experimental science, formal law, secular, intensively developing art and music, politics, mass governance, urban organization, and other institutions of social life. Hence for purposes of such historically oriented sociology the concept of “estate” (Stand) was quite appropriate for meeting the challenges of a comparative typological analysis that operates with various constructs of fading or already vanished social forms and comparing them with modern types of interaction. Therefore, if the initial concept of der Stand provisionally denoted the equivalents of various “closed” and hierarchical social entities (in recent terminology—“exclusive” social interactions) legitimized by tradition, religious beliefs, custom, etc. (castes, monastic or chivalric orders, archaic ancestral “classes,” such as the Roman division into patricians, equites, plebeians, freemen, slaves, etc.), the eventual version of these constructs should be represented by the concept of “status” in the modern terminological sense, i.e., a functional position in a certain organization or hierarchical structure. The only important factor here is that the significance of such interaction does not derive from the actions of the participants themselves; it is not the “subjectively conceived sense” of the actors that they invest in the intentions of the Other or that they ascribe to a partner but a sense given to the interaction “from outside,” by other sources and actors. Therefore, the “honor,” authority, or prestige of a qualified (certified in his competency by the government or a corporation) official who is a specialist in his field, a teacher, a lawyer, a judge, or a minister, derives not from his personality but from the position, function, or role that he holds according to certain rules and that is directly attached to a status. This interpretation does not contradict the essence of the Weberian approach or the character of his analytical work.
28. Ibid., p. 538.
29. The term die Ehre has a broad semantic domain, which includes not only “honor” in an ascriptive-hierarchical context (the honor of a nobleman, an officer, etc.) but also “respect,” “veneration,” “homage,” “reputation” (including “a maiden’s honor”), and hence a combination of the inner consciousness of one’s own dignity and the external forms of one’s social recognition. The latter factor is especially important for sociological examination.
30. Ibid., pp. 538–539.
31. Or “conduct of life, a way of living life,” as the Weberian concept of Lebensführung may be translated. Ibid., p. 538. I stress again that what is meant is not today’s concept of “quality of life,” with which it is sometimes confused, but a value-engendered social order that lies outside the framework of goal-oriented or instrumental behavior, i.e., that is not subject to the criteria or considerations of utility, optimality, effectiveness, or interests. A “way of life” may be traditionally peasant-oriented (subject to the requirements of the immutability of custom or the conditions of physical survival), or perhaps conspicuously consumption-oriented, as T. Veblen described it, which was typical of groups striving for recognition of their status or oriented to hedonism, a search for existential meaning or for an experience of the “quality of life,” like hippies or yuppies (in our or Soviet conditions, the model of mit’ki [hippie artists of the 1980s] or the “generation of caretakers,” and inner emigration), or oriented to the model of methodical self-control (as in science) or self-discipline (ascetics) in following some internal religious tasks, and so forth. What is important in a sociological context is only consistency and fidelity to certain principles or views that set the tone in the entirety of the life that is conceptualized.
32. Oprichniki were members of a private army created by Ivan the Terrible that carried out his repressive policies; “the sovereign’s servants” were military officers under Peter the Great.—Trans.
33. Ibid., Ch. IV, pp. 234–244, and Ch. VIII, pp. 520–529.
34. Weber here uses his own term—Vergesellschaftung, which derives from a distinction between the “community” (Gemeinschaft) and the “society” (Gesellschaft) of F. Tönnies. But unlike Tönnies’s typological concepts, which are static structural formations, the Weberian concept refers to the procedural order of “society”: the interaction among actors in a specific framework or social context—the constant significance of the formal legal consolidation of norms of action, and hence the connection inwardly recognized by the individual between the interests and rules of interaction, the possibility of appealing to a court, to a common life order built on limiting private or corporate, including governmental, high-handed behavior. Therefore, the very conceptual system in which Weber proposes to discuss questions of social structure includes notions of a structural-functional differentiation of society. The attention of researchers is thereby transposed from an exclusively “vertical structure” (such as what Tönnies, Marx, and others had) to the necessity of combining different, vertical and horizontal, dimensions of social formations. Clearly, the processes of structural–functional differentiation (intensive development of society) can operate only if the institutional domains are formalized, i.e., if there are authorities divided in their competency and counterbalancing one another, broad representation and participation by the populace in public life, and similar attributes of a modern society that guarantees inalienable rights to a private individual and no high-handed behavior by authorities.
35. “Space as Russia’s curse,” which has been cited by many Russian philosophers, means that it is not a geographic factor but a social one: the conservation of a primitive system of state governance that has now become archaic. In essence, it is the inversion (projection) of the archaic and centralist vertical power structure onto a “geographic” and social-spatial plane of relations.
36. Governance based on a schema of the center vis-à-vis the outlying regions, where the center has the function of goal-setting and issuing directives and the outlying regions are tasked with their execution, i.e., the outlying regions by themselves have no meanings of self-sufficiency.
37. Luman [Luhmann], N. Differentsiatsiia. Obshchestvo obshchestva. Chast’ IV. Moscow: Logos, 2006, pp. 139–219.
38. The consciousness of “middleness” (of social homogeneity, lack of qualities, ordinariness, uniformity) does not represent random characteristics but rather symptoms of “Soviet man,” as described in the works of the project of that name by Iu. Levada, a “social plasma” that is easy to manipulate but very difficult to change. It is a result of a specific post-totalitarian institutional system and social–cultural reproduction of repressive authority that suppresses processes of functional differentiation and formation of group autonomies. Vagueness or lack of definition is a symptom of the persistence or inertia of the old system of stratification (rather than an indication of a lack of development of a new social structure). Soviet-type totalitarian regimes were able to function only if there was a large-scale and long-term policy of massovization of society, of intentional destruction of previous or any newly emergent “natural” (traditional, ascriptive or culturally generated) social barriers between statuses, estates, and groups. Therefore, the current identification of oneself by a certain segment of the population (the more educated groups of respondents) as members of a “middle class” is nothing more than the borrowing of a label, the appropriation of signs that “we are normal,” that “everything here is just like anywhere else,” in the developed, i.e., Western, countries. This is merely one of the symptoms of catch-up modernization, a demonstrative appropriation of signs of other people’s models of behavior.
39. Prostoi sovetskii chelovek. Opyt sotsial’nogo portreta na rubezhe 90-x. Moscow: Mirovoi okean, 1993.
40. Gudkov, L. “ ‘Doverie’ v Rossii: smysl, funktsii, struktura,” Vestnik obshchestvennogo mneniia, 2012, no. 2, pp. 8–47; NLO [Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie], 2012, no. 117, pp. 249–280.
41. An ideology consisting of a combination of Russian Orthodox ideology and traditional, KGB-like law enforcement.—Trans.