Social Persistence and Resilience across Distinct Political Orders and Regimes

Extant theorizing offers some signposts for us to construct an account of historical continuities but falls far short of explaining them in the context of profound revolutionary transformation. My main concern is to understand the social-institutional underpinnings of persistence and resilience in stratification across distinct political orders and regimes, and the implications of these patterns for long-term political outcomes. The temporal frame of the analysis straddles the pivotal moments of, and developments leading up to, the 1860s Great Reforms, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the end of communism in 1991. Conventionally, these epochs have been analyzed within the paradigm of critical junctures. Eminent works in historical sociology conceptualize critical junctures as institutionally and politically fluid moments during which policy choices are highly contingent but, depending on the specific decisions adopted, could have enduring and often self-replicating effects, conceptualized as legacies.Footnote ³⁸ This heuristic is not entirely without merit for our analysis and hence is theoretically embedded in the temporal framework adapted here: radical policy solutions for change – in intention, if not execution – are undeniably consequential for society, the economy, and political development. Yet a careful examination of these “junctures” reveals the many continuities – and nondecisions – straddling them and the broader social agency accounting for both the choices made and the successful obstructions of policies promulgated.Footnote ³⁹

One key nondecision during the Great Reforms was a failure to create and implement the rudiments of a universal public education system that would have helped to socially elevate the hitherto unfree and otherwise underprivileged strata on the bottom rungs of imperial society;Footnote ⁴⁰ another was the failure to reform the estates-based Petrine Table of Ranks in civil service.Footnote ⁴¹ The latter reflected the hierarchy of the estates while also incentivizing the acquisition of a superb education as a way of advancing on the highly structured scale of pay, progression, and pension perks embracing both government service and large swathes of occupations from teaching to medicine.Footnote ⁴² The Great Reforms thus combined features that helped further unleash the forces of a merit-based society with those of an antediluvian order where estate ascription continued to matter for one’s station in life. Together, the reforms and the non-reforms created incentives and structural opportunities for further colonization of knowledge- and skills-intensive bureaucracies and modern professions by the habitually free – and educated – estates.

The privileged citizens of the estate order were in the best position to seize opportunities in education because of either a habitual emphasis on learning, in the case of the aristocracy and clergy, or the incentives, financial resources, and value proclivities that enabled it and were also characteristic of the urban merchant and meshchane estates. Moreover, within what I loosely refer to as the educated estates category, gradations in formal status to a considerable extent shaped one’s station as a bourgeois. They influenced, say, whether he or she occupied the pinnacle of professional esteem in the elite occupations or joined the army of the modestly paid “semi-intelligentsia” as a nurse, teaching assistant, or feldsher,Footnote ⁴³ the latter category, however, still vastly more privileged than the overwhelming mass of serf subjects in the largely illiterate society.Footnote ⁴⁴ The embourgeoisement of Russia’s imperial order would be thus grafted onto the institutional palette of estates. Put simply, an important legacy of the 1860s was the substitution of one type of inequality – serfdom- and estates-originating – for another, the human capital–derived one. The latter pattern anticipates characteristics of the knowledge-privileging demos of the present era.

Consider now the “juncture” of 1917. Here, compromise upon compromise diluted the many pivotal decisions that have preoccupied the scholar of the great revolutionary break.Footnote ⁴⁵ Soviet historiography highlights the Bolsheviks’ conscious and tactical choice to work with “old” specialists as it became clear that the goals of swift industrialization and modernization were unattainable when deploying proletarian cadre alone.Footnote ⁴⁶ Mervyn Matthews traces the origins of the entrenched system of inequalities in Soviet society to the early 1920s. Lenin, his credentials of being a “fervent egalitarian” notwithstanding,Footnote ⁴⁷ endorsed the first raft of concessions to the old bourgeoisie to maintain the Bolsheviks’ tenuous grip on power. Stalin went on to codify, institutionalize, and enhance the privileges of the white-collar professional elite. Khrushchev only haphazardly and unsuccessfully attempted to undo Stalin’s class compromises before Brezhnev restored them with a vengeance.Footnote ⁴⁸

The volumes of studies in the critical juncture vein that “forensicize” the policy-elite dynamics behind these compromises have relegated to the shadows the social construction of decisions eschewed or abandoned, the concessions made, and the ideology discreetly shelved. Such “eventful analyses”Footnote ⁴⁹ – “l’histoire événementielle”Footnote ⁵⁰ – that reduce the historical process to elite decisions, high politics, and national policy tend to background, if not outright ignore, the complexity of the realm of the social that does not neatly converge with overarching political superstructures. As recent critiques have noted, critical juncture perspectives assume the singularity of the historical process; regard change as intrinsic to pivotal decisions of key players; and take as given a relatively clean structural break between epochs that then freezes, as it were, continuity in structures, institutions, and practices unleashed by the pivotal event.Footnote ⁵¹ Crucially, some caveats notwithstanding, these heuristics largely neglect the complex layering of interconnected processes that follow distinct and often conflicting temporal logics. Situating assumptions about change within important political and policy junctures ascribes causal primacy to the immediate time pegged to them while neglecting aspects of the historical process that exhibit very different characteristics in temporal scope, reach, and density of association with the present.Footnote ⁵² Here, “calendric”Footnote ⁵³ devices become a descriptive substitute, a justification for, and source of reification of an epoch. Even when not bracketed under the “critical” break rubric, this assumption is implicit in foundational works on 1917 and its consequences. The revolutionary event in these accounts is the starting point and 1991 the end point.Footnote ⁵⁴ The naïve view of Soviet institutional origins is one essentially pegged to these pivotal policies and confirmatory of what may be termed the Bolshevik “founding myths” – the Soviet university, the Soviet school system, the Soviet scientific achievements, the Soviet space project, and so forth. Because everything becomes “Soviet” and dated as bound to 1917, so too do our cognitive assumptions about the nature of the institution, achievement, or milestone in question.

This book, by contrast, has a far broader historical horizon, and it is here that the institutional-social genealogies that I reconstruct – in medicine, education, and industry – come to the aid. We know from the various institutionalist strands in sociology that institutions are often contingent in origin, but hard to reverse once established, and are inertial, adaptable, and subject to increasing returns.Footnote ⁵⁵ Yet the facet of institutions accentuated here is that specific configurations have a self-reproducing and self-amplifying dynamic not just because of embedded resources but also because of the much longer-term process of social investment. Institutions are embedders of the social both in an immediate sense of reflecting societal structures and in the lengthier scope of temporal horizons invested into them as symbolic stages in life and career progression. We may, for example, consider the tiered educational edifices of imperial Russia as important institutions both in the informal sense of structuring and channeling social gradations and in an organizational sense of established routines, modi operandi, and professional and social gatekeeping. The adolescent born in 1910 would not cease to aspire to a place in a gymnasium just because the Bolsheviks have proclaimed it as a bourgeois school; his or her parent, teachers, and social peers would fight to preserve it too.

The alternative longue durée and path-dependency perspectives that I opt for loosen up the temporally rigid demarcatory assumptions of critical juncture theory – foregrounding not backgrounding the past even when, superficially, change at the level of political superstructures appears to be deep and profound. They are far more sensitive to the layering of “multiple concurrent processes,”Footnote ⁵⁶ transcending visible structural breaks that “lock,” as it were, assumptions about change within rigid periodization frames, and potentially highly consequential for the polity, economy, and society thereafter. While the longue durée heuristic attunes us to the towering role of the distant past – including the self-explanatory natural foundations of long-term sociodemographic and economic trends – in shaping the present, path-dependency helps us make sense of the mechanisms that account for the reproduction of patterns that do warrant careful explanation, since they may counterintuitively straddle the apparent, highly visible, structural breaks and turning points in epochs. Both the longue durée and path-dependency angles are alert to the heterogeneity of the temporal aspect of change and lethargy in long-established patterns – in Sebastian Conrad’s apt characterization, “the synchronicity, of the non-synchronous.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Much as the longue durée highlights the slow unfolding but often highly resilient socioeconomic dynamics, path-dependency incorporates the multiple temporal logics accounting for why apparent structural change may not immediately shatter long-established values, practices, and institutions. Here, the temporal dimension of events itself becomes part of the causal structure.Footnote ⁵⁸

Path-dependency is best encapsulated in Arthur Stinchcombe’s heuristic of “causal loops,” whereby “an effect created by causes at some previous period becomes a cause of that same effect in succeeding periods.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The metaphorical prime mover effects creating the “cause” we are most concerned with are the heterogenous structural conditions of various territories over centuries that shape patterns of settlement, land use, frontier colonization, and migration. My main preoccupation, however, is with the effects of these historically protracted longue durée processes often of a natural, spontaneous, slow-moving kind, on the more agential, purposeful, policy-institutional dimension of the estate – both a product of state policy and a bottom-up social impulse – which in turn shaped, structured, and even calcified heterogeneity in social possibilities, rights, freedoms, and obligations. This is the “cause” occupying center stage in this book’s analysis, effecting the “loops” reverberating across the epochal events of some two centuries considered here. Stinchcombe’s framework is also attuned to the cognitive dimension of path-dependencies in institutions – these acquire a self-replicating character not only because, say, bureaucracies, or other formal and informal institutions, once established are hard to reverse but because whole generations grow up with cognitive mindsets pegged as it were to these institutions. Here, institutional resilience is attributed in an agential sense to segments of society that may be as yet outside of organizational sites reflecting wider institutional configurations but have a vested interest in perpetuating them because whole careers, life progression, and aspirations are cognitively mapped onto them. Institutional stability, maturity, and duration, of course, matter, since institutionalization creates the kinds of certainties that individuals crave as do parents for their children. Hence, Stinchcombe asserts that such “institutional self-replicating forces” are most powerful in “modern societies” considering the structured, resource-intensive modes of training and socialization into “elite” status. They are also the consequence of greater levels of competition for a position at the top of the social pyramid because “fewer channels are blocked off on ascriptive grounds.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Indeed, “in societies with familial or tribal religions, poorly developed educational systems, and little mass media, we would … expect institutional structures to be much more fragile, much more affected by wars, revolutions, and redistributions of power.”Footnote ⁶¹

Theorizing Class and Status

Anchoring the discussion on social class and status serves two broad objectives in the analytical framework outlined here.Footnote ⁶² The first is more carefully discerning the how dimension of the reproduction of social stratification that straddles a revolutionary juncture. The second is to understand the broader effects of social resilience as it impinges on the political proclivities of citizens. Unpacking the how of social reproduction goes to the root of debates about what constitutes classes and social groups. I briefly discuss these polemics and their relevance for the historical evidence presented here before addressing the question of the implications of social resilience from the perspective of broader democratic theorizing.

Analysts of social structures distinguish materialist accounts of class from those that underscore the nontangible, symbolic, ideational dimension of cleavages among groups.Footnote ⁶³ Classic materialist accounts have postulated social divisions as a function of the unequal distribution of material assets and, in the Marxist class schemata favored by Soviet ideologues, as rooted in dependency relationships between those who own the means of production and others whose labor they exploit.Footnote ⁶⁴ In Lenin’s formulation, “classes are groups of people, one of which can appropriate the labor of another owing to the different place they occupy in a definite system of social economy.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Beginning with Max Weber,Footnote ⁶⁶ and in a tradition most extensively theorized by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu,Footnote ⁶⁷ all the way to the present-day polemics into the social underpinnings of inequality,Footnote ⁶⁸ scholars have sought to inject nuance into or otherwise deflate materialist claims on social stratification. Weber famously juxtaposed status groups (Stände)Footnote ⁶⁹ with classes. Class in Weber’s analysis is defined in materialist terms:

Classes are contrasted with status groups, “amorphous communities” characterized by a “status situation” (ständische Lage),Footnote ⁷¹ distinct from a “class situation.”Footnote ⁷² Status transcends narrowly material aspects of group formation and maintenance, since it pertains to cultural preferences, tastes, and aspirations, or, in Weber’s formulation, Lebensführung.Footnote ⁷³ These intangible elements of group construction are distinct from features like property ownership, labor exploitation, or the extraction of rent.

Weber’s status groups found resonance among Western and Soviet sociologists writing in the more permissive period following Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign known as the Thaw. These works have done much to problematize – indeed, to discredit – Marxist hubris on class and inequality in Russian society. Wolfgang Teckenberg writes that the nonmaterial, cognitive orientations and preferences of status groups often trumped material aspects of Soviet classes in shaping social identities. Individuals on the same income scale – and theoretically not subjected to the exploitative owner–laborer relationship that is characteristic of capitalist societies but coming from different social-professional groups – tended to exhibit divergent friendship patterns, cultural pursuits, and parental preferences concerning children’s education.Footnote ⁷⁴ Teckenberg highlights another useful Weberian angle on classes versus status groups in distinguishing between material wealth and consumption preferences. Both, of course, not infrequently converge: “Property as such is not always recognized as a status qualification, but in the long run it is, and with extraordinary regularity,” writes Weber.Footnote ⁷⁵ Yet, while “‘classes’ are stratified according to their relations to the production and acquisition of goods; … ‘status groups’ are stratified according to the principles of their consumption of goods as represented by special ‘styles of life.’”Footnote ⁷⁶

In a proto-knowledge economy, one that prizes recognized and regulated professional credentials, specialized skills, and education, formal architectures and infrastructures of proficiency become part of the intergenerational cognitive “stylization” maps. Yet we also know from Bourdieu’s theorizing that these cognitive proclivities are not distributed evenly across groups in society.Footnote ⁷⁷ They are reproduced among the like-minded within a stable social “field,” encompassing individuals with homologous educational, leisure, and professional pursuits and aspirations, and discursively and symbolically practiced through speech, modes of comport, and cultural markers. The signifiers of belonging are simultaneously exclusionary toward others outside of the field or those representing lower social gradations within it and new entrants.Footnote ⁷⁸

In imperial Russia, the Ständestaat created not just the material but also the ideational preconditions for the colonization of expertise institutions by the educated estates. Over time, property and capital became tangential to the broader contours of the emerging professional strata, since their qualities as a status group – and the orientations mapping life progression onto the infrastructures of knowledge – helped consolidate their relational position vis-à-vis others.Footnote ⁷⁹ The embeddedness in expertise-intensive institutional infrastructures that is characteristic of modern states facilitates adaptation across regime types, since the status group, and the various substrata that comprise it, possesses prized knowledge and skills and, indeed, the bureaucratic-organizational resources to resist change.

Yet skills, narrowly defined, and broader knowledge, be it cultural, transactional, market, or other, engender individual autonomy beyond the bureaucratic-institutional structures of modernity. Institutional resources provide the status group with clout vis-à-vis the state’s bureaucratic and political machinery; but individual perspicacity also enables fluency, fluidity, and occupational hedging, engendering, to use the Hungarian sociologist Iván Szelényi’s apt distinction, autonomy even when the individual or the group is lacking authority. Alternatively, to use the heuristics proposed in another study, Bolshevik social “appropriation” may, of course, lead to some career-motivated party membership and activism, thereby leading to “subversion” of the autonomous potential of some educated members of the old middle class, but others in this group may well avoid the cadre or managerial route, instead joining professions or taking part in pursuits that are relatively free from the oppressions of ideological dogma. In fact, the skills of some would be so highly valued by the regime that it would follow only lax party membership criteria for particular high-demand specialties.Footnote ⁸⁰ Autonomous possibilities would also be available to the strata blessed with socialization in both the knowledge infrastructures of a modern society and the experience of private entrepreneurship and the business acumen intrinsic to the materially defined bourgeoisie as purveyors of property and capital.

My emphasis on the cognitive and institutional incorporation of feudalism-originating free estates into modern knowledge organizations departs from accounts focusing on class that are couched in exploiter/exploited terms. The broader time reach enables us to perceive how inequitably distributed human capital derived from a feudal order emerges as the constant privileging marker that transcends the variability of distinct regimes’ governing politics, property ownership, and social relations. If anything, the status resilience of the educated estatist group precisely derives from fluidity in occupational navigation in modern knowledge-privileging societies – as when the merchant invests heavily into superb engineering education for his or her son, or the artisan and rentier into a future academic career at a public university. Much as with the concept of “generation,” not amenable to neat partition,Footnote ⁸¹ so too do we face difficulties in carving out the professional from the entrepreneur. These observations and the questions they raise are not as self-evident as they seem, since the long shadow of the Marxist chimera has continued to influence the most recent polemics on social distinction and division in society. Thus, Thomas Piketty, in his landmark Capital in the Twenty-First Century,Footnote ⁸² drawing on the work of his compatriot Pierre Bourdieu, provides a very cursory discussion of cultural-human capital as relevant to the broader structures of inequality in Western societies. Unfortunately, Bourdieu’s insights, relegated to one page, are interpreted in purely materialist terms, since the author alludes to “public money” as pivotal in the distribution of, and correctives to, nontangible capital of various sorts in society.Footnote ⁸³ That an esteem for skills, knowledge, and cultural endowment transcends leveling regimes may well also be obscured as analysts focus on the temporally proximate structures of polity and policy without unpacking the fine dynamics of social reproduction in a historically sensitive way. Piketty’s work has, for instance, been lauded for the analytical framework that spans at least two centuries – and for his deft analysis of the ostensibly leveling phase associated with the communist project in Europe, warranting subtle calls for peaceable and amicable forms of economic redistribution. Yet evidence from the historically universalist analysis of Pitirim Sorokin – not referenced in Capital – reveals the failures of grand social equity schemes and the cyclical, fluctuating, and trendless nature of inequalities:

This book dissects some of the bases for these undercurrents – the lived-in and practiced, daily and calendrically affirmed social hierarchies – pegged to the aspirations for institutional embedding in a school, career, and profession – and transcending any losses or inflictions of the material “base” of social relations.

The Middle Class and Democracy

Sensitivity to the historical underpinnings of the estates-derived bourgeoisie and their reincarnation as white-collar professionals in Soviet Russia allows us to discern elements of heterogeneity within a stratum conventionally bracketed under one generic middle-class umbrella. Soviet Russia took the credit for engendering a new middle class from among the hitherto underprivileged worker and peasant masses, one that shared the designation of an intermediate social layer or prosloyka of white-collar employees and intelligentsia with the remnants of the old bourgeoisie. The copresence of such distinct substrata within one national setting is nontrivial for democratic theorizing. According to a venerable tradition in political science, modernization processes engender an enlightened, educated, and autonomous demos; and, as the size of this group grows, so does, arguably, a constituency favoring political openness, moderation, and the rule of law.Footnote ⁸⁵ These assumptions have been subjected to scrutiny when applied to “deviant” states that have “modernized” but have failed to live up to expectations of support for a democratic political system among the middle classes.Footnote ⁸⁶ In his seminal work on democracy, Robert Dahl took issue with teleological premises about the political consequences of development that sanitize the national context.Footnote ⁸⁷ Drawing on the work of the University of Chicago economist Bert Hoselitz,Footnote ⁸⁸ Dahl distinguished between a middle class engendered “autonomously” as part of a process of gradual capitalist development and one fabricated speedily consequential to state-led modernization.Footnote ⁸⁹

Concerns about a weak democratic commitment, if not authoritarian complicity, of the state-dependent middle class in countries sharing a legacy of rapid state-led modernization have been echoed in recent empirical scholarship on present-day autocracies and developing democracies.Footnote ⁹⁰ Several sets of causal mechanisms have been proposed to account for these patterns. Whether in China, India, or Russia,Footnote ⁹¹ the democratic ambivalences of a state-fabricated middle class have been linked to widespread state employment and dependencies; loyalty toward incumbent regimes because of the indebtedness of traditionally underprivileged groups to the state for their social elevation; and, in post-communist contexts in particular, fears, dependencies, and pressures among employees of large communist-era industries that make them vulnerable to workplace mobilization during elections.Footnote ⁹²

My analysis advances these debates further insofar as it takes the emphasis away from contingencies pegged to individual orientations within an immediate political context, highlighting instead the temporally far broader processes of social construction. Occupational status is connected to structural possibilities for individual and group autonomy within a diverse employment landscape. The human capital and other value attributes that make such autonomy possible are not easily reducible to state policies of social uplift pursued in a compressed time span. Moreover, assumptions concerning their leveling consequences are questionable in settings with a long legacy of institutionalized social gradations – in Russia, for instance, embodied in the caste-like institution of the estate. Armed with the Dahl–Hoselitz conceptual toolkit, we may appropriately regard societies living through communism from the point of view of the layering of both state-directed, “induced,” or “hegemonic” processes as well as the more spontaneous, gradual, and “autonomous” ones in the construction of social groups. The autonomous inputs would include both familial channels and a broader exposure to a capitalist plural, modern, urban society associated with a prior politically distinct and temporally distant order.

Such a perspective would also help us to adjudicate between leading strands in communist-era sociological debates between the so-called modernizers versus those in the Homo sovieticus camps.Footnote ⁹³ While the former argued that even communist modernization could, over time, nurture a democratic citizen, the latter tended to bring to the fore the indoctrinating aspects of Leninist polities fabricating a brainwashed citizenry.Footnote ⁹⁴ More recently, Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua Tucker have systematically analyzed the continued relevance of this aspect of communist societies in understanding differences in public attitudes as compared to contexts that have not experienced communism.Footnote ⁹⁵ Whether through indoctrination in schools, in the professions, or in routinized ideology-impregnated practices of community engagement, citizens in communist societies have arguably internalized values, participatory attitudes, and modi operandi that constitute a hindrance to democratic consolidation. Another strand of theorizing, the “Soviet subjectivity” school of thought,Footnote ⁹⁶ while highlighting citizen agency in navigating, constructing, and interrogating identity in a communist polis, has also privileged the public realm as the core around which these subjectivities – the “self” and “subjecthood” made ostensibly productive by the Soviet experienceFootnote ⁹⁷ – are constructed and debated. Scholars link these subjectivities explicitly or implicitly to the apathy, cynicism, or, alternatively, agency of the Soviet and post-Soviet citizen.Footnote ⁹⁸

The middle ground proposed here takes the emphasis away from the implications of inputs intrinsic to the communist experience and instead highlights the parallel channels of genesis of the middle class, embracing both the more autonomous processes of socialization preceding the communist period and those intrinsic to state-led hegemonic modernization.Footnote ⁹⁹ The question then becomes not whether communist regimes helped engender a modern – democratic – citizen, thereby sowing the seeds of their own destruction, or indeed the extent to which they trampled on society’s potential for democracy, but whether and how the legacies of the autonomous pre-communist demos were able to survive through the decades of hegemonic societal remolding.

Education

Following a voluminous body of evidence spurred on by the modernization paradigm,Footnote ¹⁰³ I regard education, broadly defined, as a starting point for unpacking the legacies of social structure and their present-day social-political implications. I link the spatially heterogenous patterns of education and professional training to the imperial distribution of estates. The Bolsheviks used extant human capital because it facilitated industrialization and human development. Civil strife, economic collapse, famine, epidemics, and disease engender a dis-leveler effect whereby post-revolutionary shocks to regime legitimacy incentivize even further the reliance on – and social elevation of – the dietitian, the veterinarian, the medic, and the civil engineer.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The implication of the tactical decision to embrace the “bourgeois specialist” is the reproduction of spatial heterogeneity in human capital in Russia’s regions. Put simply, territories with a larger pre-revolutionary share of the educated estates are likely to exhibit higher rates of literacy, schooling, and university attendance. Anticipating the results of the statistical analysis, we can confidently say that this is an appropriate starting point for the theory proposed here.

As noted, simply reasserting covariation between education and democracy is problematic. Recent evidence about education and professional training in autocracies has been linked via various pathways – either through ideological indoctrination in schools or via the mechanism of fabricating loyalty and professionally dependent constituencies – to authoritarian values and support rather than democracy. Classic accounts of the Soviet project precisely highlight spectacular achievements in evening out educational access and providing opportunities to those from modest backgrounds and to the illiterate rural residents and semiliterate factory workforce in particular, strata that would then enter the urban white-collar labor force.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Generational change would also inevitably interfere with assumptions about straightforward links between the quality and extent of imperial-era, as compared to Soviet-period, education of the strata who may be first-generation literates or secondary school attendees. Analyzing the estate makeup of a territory and its employment structure in late imperial Russia and education as measured by literacy would be one way to explore variations between “autonomously” nurtured bourgeoisie and one engendered consequential to the policies of an authoritarian state. We would expect that territories exhibiting better educational outcomes and professional development would possess not only the infrastructures of modern education that the Bolsheviks appropriated and expanded but also greater availability of a skills base among the educated estates to deliver schooling and professional training. Demand for education, which I hypothesize remained habitual and inertial among imperial Russia’s bourgeoisie and proto-bourgeois strata, would also be higher in such territories.

Professional Incorporation and Autonomy

If we were to simply employ literacy or educational attainment statistics – individual-level attributes of citizens residing in districts – our analysis would be insensitive to the broader social contexts in which individuals had been embedded at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution; to nuances of their socialization; and to collective value transmission. Because, as I shall demonstrate, appropriation of the human capital of individuals to serve the Bolsheviks’ developmental agenda is inseparable from the story of the appropriation of professional institutions, my second hypothesized channel of persistence is bureaucratic-social autonomy nurturing islands of social distinction and oppositional orientations vis-à-vis the state.

One pattern that emerges from even a cursory examination of the estate makeup of imperial Russia’s professional institutions is that the various estates do not exhibit patterns of random and chance distribution. The Soviet state-appropriated professionals thus maintained a certain estate profile, something that nurtured the corporate aspect of professional embeddedness, value, and identity construction. The assimilation of the historically privileged groups’ social distinctions into modern institutions of the professions, learning, and quasi-civic enterprise – often with the aid of substantial familial investment – facilitates resilience in social structure, not least because modernizing regimes appropriate such institutions as part of the agenda of hasty state-led development. Moreover, even in a communist context, over time, there would be possibilities to self-select into what Sorokin describes as “deliberative,” as distinct from “executive” employment sites, those like academia, research, or the arts where intra-professional gradation is not as “clear cut” nor so “centralized as in purely executive bodies.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

In what ways would this pattern of incorporation matter for understanding the social underpinnings of democratic support during and after communism? In addressing this question, I draw attention to professional and civic autonomous action in evidence under the old regime and carried over into the institutions of Bolshevik Russia. This is particularly relevant in the case of cultural institutions where the haute bourgeoisie comprised of nobles, educated scions of clergymen, and merchant philanthropists found refuge as the witch hunts against “former people” raged.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The autonomous action represents an extension of the legacies of the estate corporation and of impulses nurtured against the background of the enlightened society’s evasions and resistance to the encroachments of the tsarist state. Yet autonomous impulses would extend to other arenas that we associate with the large Soviet public sector, notably in education, medicine, and engineering.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The appropriation of the empire’s professional institutions would be consequential not only for enabling individuals with a particular social-estate profile in their impulse for social distinction but also for endowing them with a modicum of autonomy vis-à-vis the state.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Social Closure

The third and related channel of social persistence and resilience is social closure. Unlike the other two channels, which operate at the juncture of state policy and society, social reproduction via this route may well operate despite state policies not because of them. The Bolshevik state may have been eager to even out educational inequalities and obliterate the bourgeoisie, yet I identify values transmitted via the familial and pre-revolutionary social networks as an essential ingredient in the intergenerational reproduction of the social structure. Following Stinchcombe, and drawing on the theorizing of Bourdieu, we would expect to observe a form of inertia in the aspirational dimension of social status, since, even against a radical revolutionary upheaval, the individual would remain embedded within a multigenerational, familial, and social environment or “field” that would have socialized within oneself the expectation of an education, a profession, a cultural status befitting one’s station in society. With respect to the urban bourgeoisie, nobility, and clergy, we would expect to observe the reproduction of habitual impulses in learning that could be contrasted with the aspirations of lower status groups targeted as beneficiaries of Bolshevik policies of social uplift. Social closure would also operate at the level of selectivity in social interaction. Again, we would expect socialization to exhibit continuities with past patterns of ties and bonds exhibiting estatist characteristics.

Finally, I expect social closure to operate at the level of values, practices, and networks that could only have originated and functioned outside of state policy and sanction. Some – like engagements reflecting familiarity with market production, trade, and finance, as would be the case with merchants who before the Revolution owned mills, bakeries, and farms – in my analytical framework constitute direct channels of maintenance of bourgeois skills and values. Other aspects of values extraneous to Bolshevik policy would be indirectly related to the germination of autonomous social impulses vis-à-vis the state. In the latter category are embeddedness in, and connectedness to, outside sources of information transmitted via correspondence with émigré relatives abroad, remittances, and, via these channels, access to resources facilitating adaptation and shadow market exchange under socialism.

Time: Historical and Clock Aspects

The above-discussed three mechanisms of social persistence are attuned to the complementarities, disjunctures, and clashes between the slow- and long-maturing social and the fast-paced and radical political realms. The various dimensions of time in the analytical framework warrant some further conceptual elaboration. This section dwells at some length on the questions of how and why careful attention to the temporal structure of the causal processes helps further unpack the paradoxical logics of social persistence despite the revolutionary juncture and post-revolutionary societal remolding that spanned seven decades.

Scholars working in the comparative sociology and comparative historical analysis traditions distinguish between the physical aspects of clock time, as captured in dates, tempo, pace, and duration of policies and events, and the “thick”Footnote ¹¹⁰ aspects of historical time. As Marcus Kreuzer explains, calendric sequences like hours in a day or weeks are units of time that are not historical: “they are recurring and not tied to a specific context whose comparison across time helps us understand change through time and hence historical time.”Footnote ¹¹¹ In the narratives on communism, the physical aspects of clock time have taken primacy in that the project’s “duration” neatly overlaps with the calendric milestones of 1917–91, taking precedence over historical time. Yet sensitivity to both the clock and the historical dimensions of time – to variation in the contrasting but co-constituting, “time scales” or Zeitschichten, “layers of time” – both those fleeting and the tectonicFootnote ¹¹² – warrants simultaneous expansion of our epochal horizons but also calls for the shrinkage, as it were, of notions of physical time – in our case, the duration of communism as a project itself. Let me explain.

Consider a revolutionary situation where the legitimacy of the new power holder hinges on effective delivery of basic public services.Footnote ¹¹³ Picture the civil strife, the famine, the epidemics, the disease that accompany events of gargantuan historical proportion like the Bolshevik Revolution and that may even be intrinsic to them. These are fast-paced happenings incentivizing a fallback on expertise, knowledge, and education, engendered in the long historical process of social construction – aspects of “thick” historical time that foil attempts to map human lives, values, and agency neatly onto the revolutionary epoch. Institutional longevity may consequently effect regress, reversals, compromises, or a status quo fallback in policy in the now, nurturing, via a causal loop, social-institutional resilience at times of profound change during which we would least expect inertia. In the immediate post-revolutionary period, millions of people not only perished in the Civil War but succumbed to raging epidemics and famine. Typhus furnishes one example. While, in 1913, the country registered 7.3 cases of typhus per 10,000 people, in 1918, the figure rose to 21.9 and to 265.3 in 1919, reaching an “all-time high” of 393.9 per 10,000 people in 1920.Footnote ¹¹⁴ “‘Typhus,’ Lenin declared shortly after the revolution, ‘among a population [already] weakened by hunger without bread, soap, fuel, may become such a scourge as not to give us an opportunity to undertake socialist construction … Either the louse defeats socialism or socialism defeats the louse.’”Footnote ¹¹⁵

Long-established institutions, whether in medicine, education, or the veterinary sciences – encapsulating the edifices, skills, and horizons in training and experience – acquire urgent resilience in such troubled junctures precisely because no time could be wasted on creating new, properly “communist” institutions, lest millions more people die of starvation or disease and survivors take to the pitchfork to dislodge the opportunists who have seized power. This angle, morbidly prescient in the world of COVID-19, is distinct from perspectives on crisis points as propitious to institutional change.Footnote ¹¹⁶ My assumption concerning the great dis-levelerFootnote ¹¹⁷ effect of fast-based revolutionary whirlwinds precisely derives from sensitivity to the immediate urgency of knowledge as against the temporally far more protracted, stable, and slow intergenerational processes of institutional construction and of intra-institutional social and cognitive embedding. Calamity, in such times of crisis, finds strange bedfellows with stability! The duration, pace, trajectories, and cycles of these overlaying occurrences – key temporal concepts in comparative historical analysisFootnote ¹¹⁸ – would of course vary across historical contexts subjected to communism; and the consequences for social resilience would be different too. The confluence of processes with a fast-paced tempo and social currency acquired via slow, protracted, long-maturing, long-horizon – transgenerational – nurturing of expertise creates immense possibilities for the calcification of the social structure, warranting a fresh angle on how we regard the social consequences of “social revolutions,” and solutions to inequality, in the present.

The professionalization of Russia’s estates-derived bourgeoisie, I conjecture, engendered concomitant “life course” progressionary milestones – subjective aspects of the perception of times past, present, and futureFootnote ¹¹⁹ – the school, the university, the coveted service title, the modern occupation, often organically coexisting with private entrepreneurship, trade, a business. These social identities would be operating at the level of far more expansive temporal frameworks than those enchained to 1917 and Bolshevik policy. Indeed, they would have long become “social facts” in their engrained perception of naturalness and inevitability.Footnote ¹²⁰ A nuanced appreciation of these fluid orientations – of the people “left out”Footnote ¹²¹ of the macro-historical, Marxian-march-of-history assumptions, or of the political grandee-, events-centered, “eventual”Footnote ¹²² analyses of the social scientist – would thereby help us relativize the comparatively privileged estates’ perception of loss when the Bolsheviks confiscated their properties and other possessions. Numerous accounts have prioritized this material shattering in assuming away the old bourgeoisie. Yet scores of documentary records, whether memoirs, letters, or other private papers, reveal that, in fact, overwhelmingly, the sense of disorientation, desperation, and anger is attached to restrictions on the pursuit of habitual trajectories of a nonmaterial essence – the place in the gymnasium for the clever aristocratic boy; the university offer withdrawn from the adolescent merchant girl; the professional possibilities in service for the meshchanin-rentier circumscribed; the scientific work in a laboratory for the clergyman-veterinarian cut short.Footnote ¹²³ To return to comparative historical sociology concepts, in terms of historical time, the orientations of the generic bourgeoisie would span the horizons of multiple generations prior to and following 1917; and the clock time that has meaning would be, say, the urgency of the beginning of the new school year, and hence the need to enact, to preserve, and to adjust as best as possible the arenas of pedagogic–professional–scientific interaction from before.

Despite the apocalyptic perturbations that occurred in the decade that followed the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the Bolshevik coup, we may then consider 1928 as a more appropriate starting point for analyzing socially meaningful communist legacies than 1917 and 1986 – the year that Mikhail Gorbachev commenced his far-reaching reforms and autonomous society emerged from the shadows – as the more appropriate end point. Soviet communism in its most socially shattering forms would have lasted not seventy but fifty-eight years, barely two generations according to this view, and, even so, with many of the caveats that I dissect throughout the book as to what “communism” really meant if we reconsider its purportedly uprooting, modifying, and corrective impacts. Such an adjustment in periodization could be defended on the grounds that social calibration processes in the 1917–28 period, while punctuated with repression, civil war, and “war communism” shocks, were less consequential for the structure of society than those that followed. The Leninist regime inflicted far more draconian projects on the Russian people post-1928, even if “dress rehearsals” for those same policies occurred earlier on a smaller scale. Churches, synagogues, and mosques were destroyed or closed; “bourgeois” university faculties and schools were suspended; professionals were purged; private enterprise was choked and entrepreneurs repressed, exiled, or pushed into the shadows; collectivization was forced upon the peasantry; the Gulag was institutionalized, consolidated, and metastasized across the vast stretches of the Soviet empire; and, eventually, entire peoples were decimated. Reversals, regress, and a relaxation of course followed key “milestones” and policies after 1928. Yet demarcating the 1917–28 period as only vaguely communist would analytically sensitize us both to the radical changes that did occur post-1928 and to the many qualifiers we could add to their effects even after that point, precisely because the “bourgeoisie” would have had a decade under the new regime to solidify old ties; train children and grandchildren in properly tsarist institutions; acquire, retain, or consolidate anchors in a respectable profession; and, crucially, the patriarch and the matriarch, while still alive, would have had a decade to pursue an injunctional agenda vis-à-vis the values of the younger generation.

The analytical framework also warrants linking time to space. Not only does the pace of change vary depending on where you are in the spatial matrix – the metropolitan center or the provinces far removedFootnote ¹²⁴ – but the tempoFootnote ¹²⁵ of happenings in one location shapes strategies of individual and network survival based on perceived havens with a far slower rate of change. Many an aristocrat or merchant spent years, if not decades, sitting out, as it were, the vagaries of class policy in a provincial museum or library only to then reinvent themselves as the cultural aristocracy in the metropolitan Soviet Union. Conventionally periodized slices of time pegged to the New Economic Policy (NEP) or the Great Purge would not capture their predicament. Spatial separation also enables survival in a temporally broad sense of career progression – for who would recognize in the leading Soviet newspaper editor in Moscow the scion of a provincial merchant family running an empire of bathhouses in imperial Samara?Footnote ¹²⁶ Where could we place such a not-so-hapless descendant of the purveyor of capitalist enterprise turned literatus in the Marxist scheme of things, impoverished as it is of sensitivity to the complexity of time and space and generations in the construction of social identities, professional stations, and behaviors? Space–time matrices in my analysis are also inclusive of fast-paced transnational diasporic–émigré linkages that Soviet policy facilitated as it encouraged remittances as a cash cow for the currency-starved Soviet state. At the same time, the space–time conundrum has the unfortunate role of the conceptual “blinker” in my analysis, since many a scholar would assume away social resilience precisely because of the time-compressed and spatially expansive human dislocation intrinsic to the Gulag, the exiles, the deportations, and the grand projects to industrialize the frontier. Yet, as will become clear, social ties were energetically reconfiguring and self-correcting in spite of and even at times because of dislocation, mirroring pre-revolutionary associations among individuals.

Large-n Statistical Analysis

District- and region-level statistical analysis helps tease out the significance of estate constellations as drivers of general variations in socioeconomic development and democratic quality over and above Soviet modernization policies.Footnote ¹²⁷ The regional data, which are supplemented with individual survey data and within-region social network analysis, also allow us to distinguish between the surviving legacies of an “organically” nurtured bourgeoisie/middle class and one “incubated”Footnote ¹²⁸ more recently under a “hegemonic” modernizing order. The units of analysis cover the full developmental-social-political spectrum of territories, from wealthy industrial giants with oppositional voting patterns to economic laggards predictably delivering a pro-Kremlin vote.Footnote ¹²⁹ The spatial and historical underpinnings of development also vary. Unlike the earlier work of economic historians who have deployed data for European Russia only, my universe of observations encompasses the entire gamut of regions as diverse as the Black Earth lands in European Russia, with their historically high density of serfdom, agrarian dominance within the economy, and socioeconomic underdevelopment; the Siberian and Far Eastern frontier regions, with a very different set of historical legacies of development, Soviet and pre-Soviet; and the Middle Volga and North Caucasus territories that combine elements of the frontier with economic characteristics of European Russia. These various territories also featured distinct constellations of estates. Anticipating the results, I find that the imperial-era social structure is a significant predictor of variations in regional occupational patterns and democratic quality over and above communist modernization legacies. The “general linear reality”Footnote ¹³⁰ exposed in my large-n analysis would nevertheless stop short of uncovering the “interactionist”Footnote ¹³¹ complexity driving the paradoxical reproduction of the social structure underpinning a bourgeois social order in a revolutionary polity that saw its raison d’être as obliterating that very social order.Footnote ¹³² I therefore select one region for an in-depth exploration of the complex mechanisms behind the statistical results.

Single-Case Selection

My “single case within one national context” framework departs from empirical strategies pursued in classic works in historical sociology concerned with radical revolutionary transformations. Studies in the “critical juncture” tradition have often worked with several country cases. This research and, more broadly, landmark books in comparative historical sociology have tended to explicitly rely on secondary historical sources.Footnote ¹³³ The strategy of mining published historical monographs is, of course, the only feasible one considering the methodological device of comparison of multiple countries across long time stretches. This approach is not appropriate for advancing the research goals I set for myself in this study. To begin with, I find problematic the assertion that goes something like “historians have already done all the groundwork for us social scientists.” Conceptually, this is fraught, considering that historians may ask certain questions while ignoring others. Ideological biases may well creep into the kinds of questions posed and the ways they are answered. Moreover, the availability of sources may simply relegate an important question into the realm of the non-question. Consider the example of social structure – the topic closest to the heart of this book. No single work of history has, as far as I am aware, systematically analyzed the adaptation, destinies, or reproduction of the “bourgeois” estates of merchants and meshchane in Soviet Russia.Footnote ¹³⁴ By contrast, we have substantial historical scholarship on the social mobility of the proletariat, which was actually barely emergent in 1917 but accorded high prominence in Marxist visions of the march of history.Footnote ¹³⁵ Simply relying on secondary sources to unpack the estates-related trajectory of inequality and the resulting variations among social groups and within the middle class would not get us very far, as this is not a question that Western, let alone, Soviet historians have concerned themselves with very much. Why might that be the case?

Figure 1.1 Map of Samara

Two sets of works suffice to illustrate the ways that the epoch in which historical tomes are produced may crucially shape both the questions asked and the answers proposed. One is the quasi-hagiographic excursion into Soviet achievements written by Sydney and Beatrice Webb in the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote ¹³⁶ The other, far more nuanced, set of works is by the historian Sheila Fitzpatrick. The Webbs were, of course, working at a time when many left-wing intellectuals embraced the promise of communism before illusions were shattered in the wake of Stalin’s show trials and knowledge about the human cost of collectivization and the purges became widespread.Footnote ¹³⁷ Fitzpatrick belonged to a different generation of social historians who wrote Soviet history in the wake of the anti-establishment social upheavals in the West in the late 1960s and 1970s. Against this zeitgeist, the Soviet state’s apparently spectacular inroads into social mobility would represent a far more interesting and relevant question than would the possibility of the reproduction of the bourgeoisie that Stalin proclaimed extinct by the mid-1930s but which may logically constitute a legitimate subject of scholarly inquiry in the period after communism collapsed, when scholars began to grapple with questions of the pro-democracy and pro-market orientations of the post-communist citizen. Yet, from the 1990s onward, for many historians – and writers of popular historical jeremiads – the more interesting questions became Stalinist destruction, terror, and uprooting, not continuities and adaptations.Footnote ¹³⁸ Here, again, we observe the phenomenon of the non-question sorely problematizing reliance on secondary historical sources.Footnote ¹³⁹ My chosen empirical strategy is therefore to sacrifice the potential for generating systematic comparative insights from qualitative analysis of several cases and instead reap the benefit of immersing myself into the hitherto underutilized papers from provincial archives and other eclectic troves of materials.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Sourcing the archive and validating findings employing new data allow me to form my own impressions about pivotal policy decisions and social antidotes to them. Historians have charged that “quantitative results are trivial, since they prove only what has been known already.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ This book will hopefully escape that criticism because of the blend of original history and data analysis.

The region of Samara constitutes, in my study, the “pathway” case,Footnote ¹⁴² which helps test and tease out mechanisms otherwise prone to concerns of spurious correlation between variables like “estates” and “democracy” not only removed in time but straddling three regime types – tsarist monarchy, communism, and post-Soviet failed democracy. Samara typifies Russia’s other historically cosmopolitan, trading, and enterprising regions, though it, of course, also exhibits characteristics peculiar to the historical contingencies of the place. Protestants and Catholics, Jews, Germans, and Poles have been as historically constitutive of the social fabric of this region as the Eastern Orthodox, Muslims, ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Mordovians, and Tatars. Merchants and meshchane enjoyed social prominence in the fast-developing towns. A frontier territory and one with some steppe soils less fertile than in the Black Earth lands, for centuries it served as a haven for peasant escapees, vagabonds, bandits, and rebels.Footnote ¹⁴³ Serfdom never took root as much here as in the Black Earth Central Russian gubernii. A significant proportion of peasants were under state or Crown authority, their burdens, writes Orlando Figes, “not as onerous as those of the serfs,” a “distinction [that] continued to be true after the Emancipation.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Moreover, while not a stellar haven for highbrow education, Samara’s overall literacy and education levels were comparatively high. Samara City’s location on the Volga facilitated impressive development as Russia industrialized. The river had historically been a natural artery for commercial trade between the Northern industrial and the Southern grain-producing regions as well as the mineral-rich Urals. By the time of the Bolshevik coup, Samara had been connected to virtually all the new railway lines linking the vast swathes of empire from Central Asia to the Caucasus and Siberia and constructed during the nineteenth century’s railway boom.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The native merchant and foreign capital–driven industrial expansion also led to the flourishing of sophisticated pastimes, civic activism, and philanthropy.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ During the Civil War, in 1918, Samara briefly became the seat of the anti-Bolshevik Constituent Assembly (Komitet chlenov vserossiyskogo Uchreditel’nogo sobraniya, KOMUCH) aided by the mutinous Czech Legion.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

Simultaneously, Samara typifies, indeed exemplifies, the Bolsheviks’ grandstanding industrialization efforts. If we discern societal resilience even in territories with intense state-driven developmentalism, we may safely debunk received wisdoms about the consequences of revolutionary “social modernization” in areas with less intense forms of restructuring. Aside from Moscow and St. Petersburg, Samara is the only other city that served as Russia’s political center when, during World War II, Stalin turned it into a temporary national capital and ordered the relocation there of industries and workforce. A secret underground bunker was built for Stalin in Samara, and foreign embassies were quickly evacuated to the city in the early months of the war. A large penal settlement just outside of the city emerged – the Bezymyanlag camp, part of the “archipelago” of Soviet forced labor. Postwar Samara continued to attract large-scale labor migration, notably of workers and engineers who serviced the sophisticated energy, weapons production, and aerospace industries. The region is home to Tolyatti, a city mythologized as built “from scratch” and named after the Italian Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti. Tolyatti underwent population growth on an unprecedented scale owing to migration from other territories in the 1960s and 1970s to man the Volga Automobile Plant and other industries. An overwhelmingly rural region before the Revolution, Samara’s countryside also underwent profound change as agriculture was collectivized, and the formerly “backward” territories populated by seminomadic groups were brought into the fold of Soviet modernity. Societal resilience in a region experiencing economic and social change of this magnitude would constitute an important test of the argument advanced in this book.

Sources

The bulk of historical data came from the 1897 imperial population census – the most comprehensive source of demographic, occupational, and other statistics for the empire; I discuss the census further in the supplementary appendices (Appendix B). I assembled additional data on imperial elections to the State Duma (national representative assembly) and on post-communist elections; on repressions; and on aspects of historical settlement of the frontier. Matching districts with their historical antecedents – something that, as far as I am aware, others have not done for the entire territory of present-day Russia – alone took me more than a year,Footnote ¹⁴⁸ not least because of having to triangulate historical data for accuracy for each of Russia’s present-day 2,000-odd districts. For social network analysis exploring patterns of organizational and social interaction, I created a dataset out of an imperial directory of white-collar professionals in Samara City on the eve of the Revolution, comprising more than 4,000 entries. A large author-commissioned survey from Levada, Russia’s top polling agency, helps ascertain not only awareness of ancestral estates but also covariation between self-reported ancestry and occupational positioning in the Soviet labor market.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

A wide range of primary sources are jointly deployed to supplement the cross-regional and within-region statistical data. Hundreds of pages of hitherto underutilized documents from Samara’s state archives constitute the main source of information on institutions normally associated with Soviet developmental achievements. These materials, discussed further in Appendix A, shed light on the imperial foundations of professional bodies, educational institutions, medical clinics, regional universities, and the network ties that link individuals working there. They also allow us to dissect how these institutions morphed into Soviet bodies. Archival records on denunciations and repressions and data illuminating the choices to site a Gulag camp are deployed to shed further light on the appropriation of the tsarist infrastructure and skills base to advance Soviet industrial development. The Bolsheviks abandon the obsessive tracing of citizens’ social origins in the 1930s, just as they proclaim the dawn of a classless society. Where archival sources turn silent about citizens’ pre-revolutionary social positions, the recollections of the grandmother, the elderly memoirist, or the family archivist pick up and help us weave together the threads of time, illuminating the transmission of social status through the communist decades. Three family archives have aided this part of the analysis: the Constantine Neklutin archive, deposited with the Cammie G. Henry Research Center at Northwestern State University of Louisiana, chronicling the family of a merchant clan; the Zoya Kobozeva archive, which sheds light on the adaptation of the meshchane and free peasants in Samara; and the Sergey Golubkov family collection summarized in his published memoirs and illuminating the adaptation of several branches of the extended family of Polish nobles, upwardly mobile peasants, and meshchane (see the illustrative genealogies in Appendix E). More than a hundred genealogical essays by Samara’s present-day high school and university students, which they wrote as part of a regional historical competition, corroborate intergenerational social continuities in time and space. In turn, some forty-five interviews conducted with materially well-off, high status, and otherwise successful middle-class professionals, the gilded bourgeoisie of present-day Samara, tell us how the descendants of imperial Russia’s “missing middle” fared in the context of the tribulations of post-communism (questionnaire reproduced in Appendix D). Their recollections are set against narratives of the rural and blue-collar respondent. The individual accounts are cross-checked against the voices of the Soviet informant, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) official, and the regional planner that speak to us from declassified archival sources.