Book discussion: Tomila V. Lankina, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle-Class (Cambridge University Press 2022)
Tomila Lankina2; Katerina Tertytchnaya1; Ben Noble1; Guzel Yusupova3; 1 University College London, UK; 2 LSE, UK; 3 RANEPA North-West Institute of Management, UK
Discussion
Lankina will discuss her forthcoming book, which analyses the transition of Tzarist Russia’s educated proto-bourgeoisie into modern high human capital status groups. Lankina argues that Soviet society is in many ways an extension of Tzarist society and its structure of estates (sosloviya) of aristocrats, clergy, the urban merchants and meshchane and the overwhelmingly illiterate peasants. For the book, the author assembled a new historical district-level dataset with Imperial census statistics on estates, occupations, and education. The author combined these statistics with Soviet and post-Soviet occupational and other data, as well as new archival sources from Soviet and US archives, including archives of merchant and meshchane families. The book challenges materialist notions of inequality. Instead, it highlights the significance of social, cultural and educational capital of groups that had been already privileged under the late feudal orders, in the perpetuation of social hierarchies even under the most brutal communist dictatorships.
