In this innovative, carefully researched, and beautifully written book, Tomila Lankina traces the subnational variation in Russian democracy to patterns in the country’s pre-revolutionary occupational structure and ultimately to its roots in Russia’s estate system and the reforms of the 1860s. Drawing on a diverse methodological toolkit and a rich combination of quantitative and qualitative historical data, Lankina demonstrates that contrary to official ideology (and the claims of much of the earlier literature) the Soviet regime was at best partially effective in reversing the profound social inequalities of the Czarist legacy, and may have even reinforced these differences. Despite the large-scale Soviet modernization efforts, and the prominent—and often murderous—campaigns against many members of the pre-communist elites, Lankina convincingly shows that these Czarist-era elites ultimately managed to defend their privileged position during the communist period, and that their descendants were prominently represented among the emerging economic elites during the post-communist transition.
The book makes a number of important contributions. In theoretical terms, Lankina draws on sociological theories on status groups going back to Max Weber to offer an alternative to Marxist class-based explanations. Doing so allows her to explain the resilience of the “educated estates” despite their loss in material capital under communism. The Czarist elites compensated for their losses in material capital by focusing on the intergenerational transmission of human capital through a combination of commitment to education and a number of additional institutionally embedded status-preserving strategies (such as professional incorporation and social closure). The detailed discussion of these strategies represents an important contribution towards a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying the longer-term persistence and reproduction of historical legacies.
Methodologically, the book is a great example of the advantages of mixed-method work. The analysis moves back and forth between quantitative tests (including a range of regressions and network analyses) and detailed discussions of qualitative evidence both at the local level—based on archival records from the city and province of Samara—and at the individual level, following a series of prominent families and individuals based on a combination of family archives and interviews.
Empirically, the book offers a rich and nuanced picture of Russian society during an exceptionally tumultuous period of Russian history starting with the Great Reforms of the 1860s and leading up to the Putin era. The temporal coverage is matched by an effort to explain the geographic variation in both social modernization patterns and political outcomes across the entire territory of Russia. But while such temporally and geographically expansive efforts run the risk of spreading themselves too thinly, Lankina counters this risk by providing much more detailed discussion of crucial historical moments (such as the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution) and by zooming in on the local/regional dynamics of Samara to illustrate the mechanisms through which the macro-processes came to life.
While the book focuses primarily on the Russian trajectory, its theoretical approach has important implications for our broader understanding of a number of debates at the heart of the literatures on authoritarian/democratic politics and historical legacies. Thus, Lankina’s analysis of the historical bases of Russia’s “bifurcated” middle class complements Bryn Rosenfeld’s argument about the stronger democratic potential of the private-sector middle class compared to the state-sector middle class in authoritarian regimes (including Russia). Whereas Rosenfeld’s The Autocratic Middle Class: How State Dependency Reduces the Demand for Democracy (2020) focuses on the democratic consequences of post-communist employment, Lankina’s book traces these occupational choices back to the legacies of Czarist estates, and shows that descendants of the pre-communist “educated” estates were more likely to engage in entrepreneurial activities starting in the late 1980s.
Similarly, while a number of earlier studies (Andrew Janos, East Central Europe in the Modern World: The Politics of the Borderlands from Pre-to Postcommunism, 2000; Keith Darden and Anna Grzymala-Busse, “The Great Divide: Literacy, Nationalism, and the Communist Collapse,” World Politics 59, 2005; Jason Wittenberg, Crucibles of Political Loyalty: Church Institutions and Electoral Continuity in Hungary, 2006; Grigore Pop-Eleches, “Pre-Communist and Communist Developmental Legacies,” East European Politics and Societies 29, 2015) had traced variations in cross-national and sub-national post-communist political outcomes to a variety of pre-communist legacies, Lankina’s work complements this scholarship. She does so not only by expanding the geographic and temporal scope of the analysis, but—more importantly—by formulating and carefully documenting a number of causal mechanisms that help explain this persistence. In particular, while earlier work had discussed the role of families as transmission mechanisms for pre-communist education and ideas, Lankina shows that families were also crucial in shaping the demand for education, thereby facilitating the reproduction of pre-communist elites. Furthermore, the discussion of social networks and professional incorporation strategies is an important and original contribution to explaining the remarkable ability of pre-communist elites (and ideas) to withstand decades of communist social engineering efforts.
Of course, any work of this scope and theoretical ambition is likely to raise a number of questions. In terms of internal validity, I primarily wondered about two issues. First, I am not sure how to think about the primary dependent variable: Russian democracy. Even leaving aside the dramatic deterioration of the last two decades, post-communist Russia was at best a hybrid regime. And while things looked better in a few sub-national enclaves, I am not sure whether the quantitative indicators used in Chapter 7 really capture democracy in the Russian context. The two main indicators—the effective number of candidates and the Vanhanen Index—capture competitiveness, which is essential for democracy. But given that these indicators are based on the first round of the 1996 presidential elections, in which Yeltsin’s main competitor was the Communist Party candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, and where two of his main challengers—Alexander Lebed and Vladimir Zhirinovsky—relied on authoritarian and nationalist appeals, it is unclear that a closer local-level result really means an endorsement of democracy, or simply more competitive authoritarianism. The one genuinely liberal democrat in that election—Grigory Yavlinsky—received only 7.5% of the vote, and his party (Yabloko) never topped 8% in successive parliamentary elections, and while this support was higher in areas with high historical shares of “educated estates,” it nevertheless suggests that support for liberal democracy in Russia was consistently below the population share of the educated estates (roughly 13.5%). This gap suggests that even among the educated and entrepreneurial descendants of the former Czarist elites, democratic support was not particularly high, and raises the possibility that such elites may provide the basis for greater inter-elite competition rather than genuine democratization. A second internal validity question arises from the ambiguity of the meshchane category, which combines occupational elements, education, and urban residence. While Lankina acknowledges and addresses this ambiguity, and the statistical tests attempt to disentangle some of these strands, it would have been useful to test explicitly the relative importance of occupational categories versus the related but distinct factor of pre-communist education/literacy.
As with any single-country study, the question of scope conditions/generalizability looms large. The book partially addresses this issue by comparing Russia to two other (ex)communist countries (Hungary and China) in Chapter 10, which broadly confirms the correlation between the resilience of pre-communist elites and post-communist regime patterns. However, such cross-national comparisons also raise many other questions. For example, how would this theoretical framework account for the more democratic regime trajectories of Moldova compared to Russia, despite the lower pre-communist literacy and the greater decimation of Moldovan elites after the communist takeover? Similarly, how do we account for the significant recent democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland, two countries with the strongest and most resilient pre-communist educated elites in the region?
That being said—and this final point is admittedly personal and highly impressionistic—I found that the book’s primary theoretical and empirical argument, which focuses on the survival strategies of pre-communist elites after the communist takeover, “travels” very effectively beyond the Russian context. From the emphasis on education investments as a way to compensate for the loss of material capital, to the emphasis on family reunions and belonging to a “good family,” and even all the way to museum employment as a haven for marginalized former educated elites, the book brings to life in a theoretically fascinating and personally moving fashion, an important and often ignored dimension of life under communism. But while these stories are part of the personal baggage for many of us, Lankina’s book tells them at a larger scale, and shows how they help us to understand important aspects of post-communist politics.
