A Social System Oriented Toward the Past, Part II

Abstract

We view the social organization of contemporary Russia as a continuation of the Soviet socioeconomic order, whose roots extend back centuries into the past of a country that has served as the vehicle for Eurasian Orthodox civilization. This article explores the various stages of the country’s development—from the thirteenth century to the present—and argues that the collapse of the communist system in Russia led to a transition from Eurasian civilization to a new stage in Russia’s evolution—a neo-statist socioeconomic order and classical authoritarianism. By 1917, the European type of development had yet to triumph in Russia. A key factor in this was the fact that private property was not a tradition for most Russians. This paved the way for the essential restoration of the soslovie system, the enslavement of social estates by the state, and the emergence of a special category of state servants (the nomenklatura) in the Soviet Union. In other words, path dependence theory came to be realized, reproducing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a relationship between power and social estates thought to have died off in medieval Rus. For centuries, within an exceptionally stable statist order and taking a variety of forms, a system has reproduced itself over and over that features a social estate hierarchy and a system of power under which property was conditional for everyone except an all-powerful sovereign (who across the epochs has gone by different names—prince, tsar, emperor, general secretary, and president). The socioeconomic system that has emerged in post-Soviet Russia is, by its nature, statism, but in a new phase of development—neo-statism. The role of the state remains decisive, but it is not the only role being played, as was the case in the Soviet Union. Now, there is a private-ownership market component. In Russia, a dualistic social stratification is in effect that combines a (dominant) soslovie hierarchy and a socio-professional hierarchy.