2 - From Imperial Estates to Estatist Society

Summary

This chapter dissects the institution of estate (sosloviye) as pivotal to understanding long-lasting patterns of social stratification in Russian society and, relatedly, the contours, networks, and divisions within the resultant estatist public and political sphere. It focuses on the legal-policy underpinnings of the estate to understand how it found reflection in modern educational, professional, and governance institutions. First, the chapter outlines peculiarities of old-regime Russia’s semi-feudal order as engendering a wedge– or, worse, a chasm – between the estatist, or estates-derived, relatively privileged social group (and substrata within it) and the unfree peasants. It then reviews and critiques historical and sociological sources concerned with the transition from imperial to Soviet society. It argues that most scholars have assumed a clean break between tsarist and communist societies after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and that a paradigmatic shift in our understanding of the communist and post-communist social structure as rooted in imperial social stratification is warranted. Finally, it charts how the fragmentary knowledge about the reproduction of latent social distinctions and equally submerged institutional sources of autonomy among the more privileged social groups sets the stage for the subsequent chapters’ fine-grained analysis of the persistence of the estatist bourgeoisie as a legacy across regime types.