The Estate Components of Russia’s Contemporary Social Structure: a Hypothetico-Deductive Analysis and Modeling Attempt

Abstract

Simon Kordonsky — Head of the Department of Local Administration, National Research University “Higher School of Economics”. Address: 20, Myasnitskaya St., Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation. E-mail: kordonsky@gmail.com

Dmitry Dekhant — Student, Faculty of Public Administration, National Research University “Higher School of Economics”. Address: 20, Myasnitskaya St., Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation. E-mail: dmitry.dec@gmail.com

Olga Molyarenko — Student, Faculty of Public Administration, National Research University “Higher School of Economics”. Address: 20, Myasnitskaya St., Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation. E-mail: omolyarenko@gmail.com

Contemporary Russians do not introspect their social identity, which is why they experience problems defining the social group they or their parents belong to. Residents do not understand, and are not able to detect and design for themselves, the social structure and its elements — the social groups and their interrelations. On the one hand, workers, peasants and servants, whose interconnections constituted the social structure of the USSR, have by now largely disappeared. On the other hand, it is obvious that the class society once imagined by our reformers has not yet emerged.

The social uncertainty provoked by the above described issue was a starting point for the development of an appropriate model of Russia’s contemporary social structure. First of all, few possible (from the authors’ point of view) types of social structures were identified on the basis of the combination of two factors. The first is the differentiation of justice into egalitarian and distributive. And the second is the level of justice existence (reality or actuality). As a result, four types of social structure were defined: class, estate, corporative and communist.

The following step was to account for the actual state policies having direct effect on the structuring of society (e.g. the social groups that are defined by social policies and programs). The fact that some social groups are defined in legislation, and some are not, represents the social structure designed by the state. Our analysis shows that the state in Russia divides the population into four groups: they are “power” (or “servant estates” represented by municipal and government authorities), “common people”, “active population” and “marginal population”. Further, the actual estates were brought into accord with the four groups, and the sizes of the estates were estimated. It is also suggested that the calculation model developed in this paper could be then used as an independent tool for analysis of structural reactions to changes in the size of social groups.

There are, of course, no ideal (pure) types of social structure in real practice. On that basis, this paper investigates only the possibly corporative essence of the Russian society (it is considered to be practically important as estate essence, class and communists inclusions are mentioned but we have not researched them yet). The possible types of corporations and their activities are described. It became clear that the nature of estate (from the state opinion) and corporative (emerged in actuality) structures are in conflict because of their different patterns of internal connections and different models of resource distribution and allocation.

The matrix form of Russia’s social structure derived in the article is not a very common way to represent social structure compared to hierarchy or pyramid form, but hierarchies are based on subjective myths about the positioning of social groups within the social structure. Regardless, we attempt to transform our matrix into a pyramid like form. Only the most popular subjective hierarchies are considered in the paper, although the number of possible options is large.