The chapter summarizes the book’s main argument. It explains post-communist Russia’s social stratification and relatedly its democratic fortunes with reference to the social structure that predated communism. It locates the genesis of the bourgeoisie-cum-middle class, conventionally regarded as broadly supportive of democratic institutions, in the estate system of imperial Russia, which distinguished between the nobility, the clergy, the urban estates of merchants and the meshchane, and the peasantry. The estate – its juridical, material, and symbolic aspects – simultaneously facilitated the gelling of a highly educated, institutionally incorporated autonomous bourgeoisie and professional stratum and engendered inequalities that persisted throughout the communist period and plagued subsequent democratic consolidation. It demonstrates that the pre-communist social structure has shaped Russia’s stark subnational developmental and democratic disparities as well as national democratic outcomes. The chapter goes on to interrogate theories of class, modernization, and critical junctures, as well as paradigmatic earlier assumptions about the rupture associated with the Bolshevik Revolution. It then proposes causal mechanisms accounting for social resilience and persistence after the Revolution. It also puts forward an alternative periodization of communism in Russia as 1928–86. Sources used – archival sources, memoirs, private papers, interviews, historical census, as well as electoral, demographic, occupational, educational and other data for the imperial, communist, and post-communist periods – are also discussed.

This chapter’s analysis of post-revolutionary professional continuities is sensitive to the logics of the expertise-derived autonomy, leverage, and agency of the professional, the scholar, and the torchbearer of the enlightenment that are characteristic of modern societies, broadly and narrowly, of a totalizing revolutionary order, where those very agents of knowledge are subjected to ideological stigma. A full-variance cross-regional analysis provides baseline evidence of a self-reproducing nature of professional knowledge – in space and in time. While this exercise helps us partially account for regional heterogeneity in the social structure, a linear account would not do justice to the nuances of professional–personal life cycles given the checkered nature of professional reproduction; the heterogeneity in adaptation within employment sites and among social groups; and the horizontal network ties aiding social possibilities and effecting shifts within networks. The chapter provides a conceptual framework sensitive to the formal professional channels of social reproduction, namely (1) the “organization man” channels, capturing the established professions; (2) the proto-professional arenas peculiar to states with a radical social agenda, which I label the “pop-up” sphere; and (3) the “museum society,” where persecuted intellectuals, cultural figures, and the literati found safe havens. It also deploys insights from social network analysis to explore horizontal and spatial aspects of the social ties that facilitated the educated estates’ adaptation.

This chapter breaks with the typical detachment of chroniclers of Russian politics from the social wavelengths that in so many ways defy conventional periodization. Stalin may have proclaimed a classless society, and inconvenient memories were “frozen” out of discourse, yet social distinctions continued to be cognitively programmed among future generations in families and in the realm of the professional, educational, and social institutions to which they were exposed. First, I discuss theorizing on historical memory. This helps us distinguish between articulated injunctions and situational staging on the one hand and unarticulated silences on the other, as expressed in choices, symbols, or artifacts. Next, I present survey results, which corroborate not only hypothesized covariance between educated estate ancestry and white-collar occupations but, intriguingly, awareness of the placement of respondents’ forbears in the imperial estate structure. In the remaining sections, I make sense of these patterns by discussing our protagonists’ journey of ancestral reconstruction; tapping into reminiscences of private spaces and public-oriented practices within them; exploring familial injunctions and artifacts that create mental cartographies and ties structuring exclusion and belonging; and, finally, discerning the descendants’ instrumentalizations of ancestry to actively delineate their place in post-communist Russian society.

Stalinist repressions, epitomized by the Gulag, and grand industrialization projects warrant exploration of their implications for the social fabric of a place. I find social reproduction not only despite of but in some ways because of the communist industrial strategy. Whether inside or outside of the Gulag, Soviet industry appropriated both the hardware – the infrastructures of modernity – and the software – the human resources in pedagogy, medicine, research, public enlightenment, and engineering. In turn, social mechanisms of relationships of status and closure converged with the state’s developmentalist and survivalist imperatives. Unpacking these channels of resilience even when set against the most coercive aspect of Soviet planning provides additional credence to the argument that Russia had not been the purported melting pot that annihilated the society of estates. I first perform cross-regional statistical analysis to demonstrate that Soviet industries built on the tsarist industrial heritage. Next, I provide illustrative vignettes of appropriations in Samara’s consumer services, strategic armaments, and petrochemicals. I also discuss an aspect of development that has invited the naïve observer to assume a de novo approach to the Soviet project, namely the establishment of “brand-new” cities like Tolyatti. I then explore how even large-scale population movements followed the logic of social closure.

This chapter engages with theories of democratic origin and persistence, late developing states (following Gerschenkron), and workforce dependencies in post-communist settings to suggest how understanding the genesis of the middle class/bourgeoisie in imperial Russia, and distinguishing it from a middle class that is state-fabricated rapidly as part of communist late development catch-up, could help refine theories of the links between the bourgeoisie/middle class and democracy. Based on analysis of author-gathered regional and district data on estate structure and voting for the imperial First, Second, Third, and Fourth Dumas and post-communist parliament, and ascertaining that the “old” middle class exhibits greater democratic proclivities than the “new,” I corroborate the theory of a two-pronged middle class. I first explain how unpacking the genesis, resilience, and political orientations of the multilayered stratum of the educated estates nuances ongoing debates about the interaction between distinct sets of legacies associated with pre-communist and communist regimes. Next, I present analysis that systematically extrapolates the insights from the dissection of the reproduction of the social structure to explain variations in subnational democratic quality in Russia. I also perform a placebo test demonstrating how the deportation of entire communities, the Volga Germans, wipes out the effect of a social legacy.

If we can discern resilience not only in one’s position within estatist society but also in practices intrinsically at odds with Marxist-Leninist dogma, we would have greater confidence in the plausibility of the account of social autonomy presented here. The chapter locates this possibility in the market-reproducing values and networks among the most persecuted strata. I also introduce the hitherto neglected element of diasporic transnational ties that not only aided survival but sustained, nurtured, and engendered specific sets of practices and knowledge. I perform cross-regional statistical analysis of market legacies as linked to the urban estates. Archival, interview, and memoir materials then help tease out the mechanisms of transmission of market-supporting human capital and values. An analysis of transnational–local ties, which the state itself facilitated as it sought to replenish currency reserves, helps dissect their role both in generating “one-off” infusions of wealth for survival and in sustaining links to private banking and enterprise via more temporally protracted flows of remittances. The private wealth and market aspects of the bourgeois legacy are also seen as facilitating what I call hedging, encompassing both private enterprise and public sector professions, which was a career risk-minimizing strategy of the educated estates in evidence long before the Revolution.

This chapter discusses how the preceding analysis has wider, portable, comparative implications for understanding the drivers of variations in shades of authoritarianism and illiberalism in other communist legacy countries. I structure the chapter as follows. I first sketch out an analytical framework for a comparative analysis of two new cases: Hungary and China. The section also delineates limitations of scope and restrictions in applications to the universe of communist states and beyond. I then proceed to analyze each case with reference to the key variables of interest. A final section concludes with reflections on the utility of the framework for understanding social inequalities and the long shadow of premodern societies in effecting democratic vulnerabilities and resilience in the present-day illiberal world.

In this chapter I extend insights about the channels of professional continuity discerned in Chapter 4 to focus on the institutions that socialized the next generation of Soviet citizens. I first present Russia-wide data on resilience in education as related to the estates and follow this data analysis with a qualitative account of imperial schooling. Statistical analysis is strongly suggestive of the interconnected human-capital and estate drivers of spatial variations in educational attainment and institutions during the communist period and in the present. To unpack the causal mechanisms behind the statistical patterns, I adapted concepts of institutional drift and conversion to Russia’s post-revolutionary context. Insights from comparative historical analysis into institutional path-dependencies help dissect how the eclectic tapestry of schools catering to Samara’s educated society found its phoenix-like reincarnation in Soviet pedagogy, even when punctuated with closures and reforms. An exercise in historical forensics concerning the Samara Jewish School allows me to dissect some ways in which lower-status pedagogic old-timers capitalized on their new status as Soviet school headmasters. Finally, similar to patterns observed in Samara City, I dissect heterogeneity in demand for and supply of schooling within rural areas.