Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- List of contributors
- PART I INTRODUCTION
- PART II POLITICS: SOURCES OF REGIME SUPPORT
- PART III WORK: ECONOMIC/DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS
- PART IV LIFE: SOCIAL STATUS, ETHNIC RELATIONS, AND MOBILIZED PARTICIPATION
- 9 Perceptions of social status in the USSR
- 10 Nationality policy and ethnic relations in the USSR
- 11 Mobilized participation and the nature of the Soviet dictatorship
- Appendix A The SIP General Survey sample
- Appendix B Response effects in SIP's General Survey of Soviet emigrants
- Glossary
- General bibliography of Soviet Interview Project publications
- Index
9 - Perceptions of social status in the USSR
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- List of contributors
- PART I INTRODUCTION
- PART II POLITICS: SOURCES OF REGIME SUPPORT
- PART III WORK: ECONOMIC/DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS
- PART IV LIFE: SOCIAL STATUS, ETHNIC RELATIONS, AND MOBILIZED PARTICIPATION
- 9 Perceptions of social status in the USSR
- 10 Nationality policy and ethnic relations in the USSR
- 11 Mobilized participation and the nature of the Soviet dictatorship
- Appendix A The SIP General Survey sample
- Appendix B Response effects in SIP's General Survey of Soviet emigrants
- Glossary
- General bibliography of Soviet Interview Project publications
- Index
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.”
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- Politics, Work, and Daily Life in the USSRA Survey of Former Soviet Citizens, pp. 279 - 300Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987
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