Paradoxes of the Social Structure in Russia

Abstract

The social stratification of post-Soviet Russia remains one of the most controversial subject areas in Russian sociology, despite the appearance over the past decade of significant studies on these topics. As a rule, Russian sociologists tended to focus their attention on two tasks dictated by the interest of state clients in sociology: determining the parameters of the poverty of the population (and the possibilities for reducing it, or in other words, the problem of “social inequality”) and the prospects for the formation and development of a middle class. In both cases the intentions of the research work and, accordingly, the internal orientations of the interpretation of the material turned out, albeit indirectly, to be predefined ideas for ensuring the efficacy of the state’s social policy and the stability of the system of government. For models of social structure that sociologists designed on the basis of state statistics or their own empirical research (mass population surveys), they usually employed international, that is, those recognized by the sociological community, principles of classification and methods of social taxonomy of the population, which include such operational parameters as income, education, type of occupation and professional activity of the respondent, standards of consumption, affiliation of oneself or one’s family with a certain class or social stratum, as well as (but less