Professor Tomila Lankina presented her new book 'The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle-Class (Cambridge University Press in 2022)' at King's College London on 28 November, 2022.

The book argues that the Bolsheviks failed to obliterate the social structure of Tsarist Russia and that these divisions continue to have implications for understanding popular support for autocracy in Putin’s Russia now. The Soviet society is in many ways an extension of Tsarist society and its structure of estates (in Russian sosloviya) of aristocrats, clergy, the urban groups of merchants and meshchane and the overwhelmingly illiterate or poorly educated mass of peasants. The author assembled a new historical district-level dataset with Imperial census statistics on estates, occupations, and education. The author combined these statistics with Soviet and post-Soviet occupational and other data. In addition, the book contains innovative formal social network analysis of participants in urban public sphere on the eve of the Revolution. The analysis also relies on a largely unknown archive of an extended family of leading merchants in the region of Samara.

The book, which also contains a comparative chapter on Russia, China and Hungary, challenges materialist notions of inequality. Instead, it highlights the significance of social, cultural and educational capital of groups that had been already privileged under the late feudal orders, in the perpetuation of social hierarchies even under the most brutal communist dictatorship bent on obliterating the social vestiges of the Tsarist past.

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