Features of Provincial Russia

Book Review: Plyusnin Y.M. (2022) The Social Structure of a Provincial Society, Moscow: Common Place, Hamovniki Social Research Support Foundation (in Russian).

Abstract

This article reviews Y.M. Plyusnin’s monograph “The social structure of provincial society”. The monograph is the result of more than 30 years of field research on provincial Russia. Plyusnin defines “provincial society” as the totality of “local communities” of small towns and adjacent villages, located between “the Russia of large and medium-sized cities” and “rural Russia”. “Local communities” comprise smaller communes, i.e., mutual aid unions tied together by kinship and neighbor relations, spanning one or more villages, smaller towns, and their districts. The monograph analyzes the economic development of such communities,
as well as their relationships with official state structures (seen through the prism of the theory of S.G. Kordonskiy). The work opens up new perspectives for understanding the social, political, economic, and cultural reality of Russia.