Researching Status Reproduction In Russia: Defining The Problem

Abstract

This paper concerns social stratification and class structure of modern Russia. The fall of USSR has led to vast changes in lives of ordinary Russian people. However, the disintegration of Soviet Union and further reformation were provoked by internal logic of development. The Soviet reality became cause and basis for contemporary development of Russia. That is why it seems to be possible to approximate real status hierarchy in Russia by building class concept on societal level. We assume that Russian society is based on some repressive system of stratification, which prescribes particular status as an effect of family socialization, education and community type. Such a repressive system leads to formation of stable status categories – classes. The scheme and results described in this article reflect our attempt to analyze individual status trajectories in retrospection and to build model potentially enough to elicit the fact of status change or stability. We based our empirical model on set of data resulting from mass query “What is life of a Russian today?” conducted under the supervision of the Higher School of Economics, Social Policy Department (Moscow) in 2003. According to these data the following status categories were available for operationalization of respondent’s life in different life periods: occupation, education and community type. Our temporal model targeted four time points: parental status, beginning of the work life and present. Though data we used had been gathered for other purposes (not for studying reproduction of social status or looking for stable social groups) statistical analysis of profile consistency has shown, that chosen status indicators are coherent. The main question of our research could be formulated as follows: “Does Russian society contents large scale groupings of individuals, bearing similar trajectories of status change through life with a significant level of inter-group differentiation by prescribed status?” Or shortly: “Is there any class hierarchy in Russia?” Talking about our hypothetical class structure of Russian society, we might conclude that our model revealed only one stable class, monitored by other authors – the qualified workers. The other grouping considered class – “native citizens” – was not among classes in our model a priory. However, there are lots of studies on Russian urban society and comparison of cities and periphery. We had lesser efficient results concerning other “classes”: a.Capital holders are elite groups, and are excluded from mass query. b.Service class is very debatable category in Russian society: some researchers believe it does exist, others vise versa. Despite this ambivalence, all authors agree on inconsistency of most indicator groups for study of “middle class” or “service class”. c.Qualified workers are present in our model. d.“Proletariat” was strongly influenced by “perestroyka” and therefore might have lost its homogeneity. Some former workers joined the unemployed and “excluded” groups. e.“Excluded” are not particularly a class, but people with different soviet background who had the worst chances in emerging market. Certainly, methodological model presented in this article may cause of our divergence with the former results. That is a question for the future. Nevertheless, statistical analysis of profile consistency convinced us, that dynamics of occupation, education and community type during individual’s life are profiling and reflect on some other status categories. However, it will be useful to widen the range of status indicators in the future research. Our research bearing the exploratory character left many questions unanswered. At the same time our findings are original by their nature, as well as the statistical model used. We have tried to imply a stronger version of class definition to Russian reality, and our results satisfy the main goal of the research. We found some of the large scale groupings, well known among Russian researchers in social stratification. Furthermore, our approach gives the ability to suggest on the nature of these groups, weather they are “class” or not. Simple static modeling of the class is supposed to be insufficient for the definition of complex class structure, as it sees no action. Our research shows that dynamic models help to clear up the reproduction of social status in Russia and to find stable groups.