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9 - Perceptions of social status in the USSR

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2010

James R. Millar
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Summary

The October Revolution produced a memorable spectacle. As one commentator later described it:

All classes were thrown like so much scrap into a melting pot beneath which burned the fires of the revolution dissolving all the old identities. … Court ladies cleaned the streets of snow, steel barons functioned as members of house committees and together with porters and shoemakers solved questions of keeping toilets clean and obtaining firewood.

Of course, as Sovietologists well know, this venture into extreme egalitarianism was abandoned more than five decades ago, when Stalin himself denounced “the ‘Leftist’ practice of wage equalisation.” Yet, to this day, many Westerners remain curious about social stratification in the Soviet Union – the first country born of a Marxist revolution to overcome the injustices of capitalist class systems.

The question of Soviet stratification has much to recommend it, not just to Sovietologists but to social scientists in general. New findings on stratification could facilitate efforts to test or generalize Western findings. Consider, for example, the proposition that social perceptions help transmit social status from parent to child. As Bowles and Gintis state, in a much acclaimed analysis of schools in capitalist American society: “Youth of different racial, sexual, ethnic, or economic characteristics directly perceive the economic positions and prerogatives of ‘their kind of people.’ By adjusting their aspiration accordingly, they … reproduce stratification on the level of personal consciousness.”

Type
Chapter
Information
Politics, Work, and Daily Life in the USSR
A Survey of Former Soviet Citizens
, pp. 279 - 300
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1987

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