The winter of 2011–12 produced a paradoxical combination of the inevitable and the unexpected in Russia.footnote¹ The return of Vladimir Putin to the presidency was never in doubt; his crushing margin of victory in the March 2012 elections—officially, he scored 64 per cent, almost 50 percentage points more than the second-placed Communist Party candidate, Gennadii Zyuganov—gained him a third term in the Kremlin without the need for a further round of voting. However, the months prior to this democratic coronation brought a series of demonstrations of a scale not seen in these lands since the last days of perestroika. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in dozens of cities, from Vladivostok to Kaliningrad—the largest gathering, on 24 December, drawing as many as 100,000 people to Moscow’s Sakharov Avenue—to protest first against the fraudulent results of the December 2011 parliamentary elections, and then against the impending reinstallation of Putin as president. On the one hand, then, seeming confirmation of the ruling elite’s unhindered control over the political system; on the other, signs of a growing rejection of that system by a substantial part of the population.

The recent wave of protests has been seen, both in Russia and in the West, as evidence of a new awakening of Russian ‘civil society’, roused from its long post-Soviet slumber by the corruption of Putin and his associates, and their brazen contempt for the popular will. The mobilizations displayed a striking ideological breadth, running the gamut from Orthodox chauvinists to neoliberals, socialists to environmental activists, anti-corruption campaigners to anarchists; attendance also spanned the generations, from pensioners to teenagers. But, as the Western press noted approvingly, the most vocal and visible component of the oppositional marches was ‘a sophisticated urban middle class’, with consumption habits and expectations not unlike those of their Western counterparts. During the years of oil-fuelled economic growth after 2000, this layer had apparently ‘grown in size and become sufficiently affluent to assert its yearning for more accountability and less corruption’. Despite its failure to prevent Putin from garnering a majority of the vote, the arrival of this seemingly new actor on Russia’s political stage marked the start of a period of uncertainty; indeed, in some quarters its assertiveness was taken to portend the ‘beginning of the end of the Putin era’.footnote²

Such auguries rely, of course, on a Whig history refurbished for neoliberal times, in which the advance of Western consumption patterns and rising gdp per capita are the measures of progress towards the liberal-democratic norm; if needed, further proof can be found in increases in car-ownership, internet usage, foreign travel, or perhaps the quantity of ikea stores in a given country.footnote³ Crass metrics of this kind have become a staple of the mainstream Western press, especially when discussing states outside the advanced capitalist core. With regard to Russia, as elsewhere, they reveal a generalized absence of knowledge about the society in question: how is it actually structured in class terms, what is the balance of forces between its components, how are class interests articulated and advanced in both the material and ideological realms? The social historian Moshe Lewin famously described the ussr of the 1920s and 30s as ‘the quicksand society’; given the depth of ignorance about what lies beneath the country’s unchanging political surface, contemporary Russia might be described as ‘the iceberg society’.

Indeed, the social landscape of post-Soviet Russia is in many ways more opaque to outsiders than was that of the ussr. In the West, this is partly due to a general shift in research patterns after the Cold War, which had generated an enormous need for knowledge about the opposing system that, after 1991, seemed surplus to requirements. Wider changes in the discipline of sociology itself also played a role—away from synthetic overviews of a society, towards questions of ethnic, religious or subcultural identity, for example, or in favour of closer, anthropological investigations of everyday experience. A third factor applies across much of the world: with the weakening of previous forms of class identification has come a diminishing sense that society itself can be grasped by the categories of class analysis. Moreover, the convulsive character of events in Russia itself after 1991 made it difficult for analysts fully to comprehend the effects of the upheaval on society as a whole.

What follows is a preliminary attempt to map the changing shape of Russian society in the last two decades, the better to understand its present condition, and its likely future trajectories. One of the fundamental enigmas this essay will seek to explain is why a society that has suffered so dramatic a series of reversals has nonetheless remained relatively stable. It will be argued that, although the fall of the ussr brought profound dislocations, many aspects of the country’s previous social structures are still in place, resulting in a form of ‘uneven development’ in which two social orders co-exist. Moreover, contrary to the conventional wisdom of liberal ‘transitology’, which blames Soviet legacies for the deformities of Russian capitalism today, it is precisely the persistence of the old that has underwritten the stability of the new. In order to obtain a clearer picture of the ways in which Russia has been remade since 1991, however, we will need to begin by sketching out the main lines of its development in the Soviet era.

Three interrelated processes dominated the twentieth century in what became the Soviet Union: urbanization, the shift from an agrarian to an industrial base, and the system-wide installation of non-capitalist socio-economic relations. These processes unfolded very rapidly, bringing the creation of new social groups, the destruction of old ones and the expansion or metamorphosis of existing categories. Looking over a 70-year span—see Figure 1, below—we can see in broad outline what the main social outcomes in the ussr were, according to the official view (on which more shortly). Firstly, and most strikingly, there is the long, steady dwindling of the peasantry—for centuries the unmoving foundation of the Tsarist social order. In the Soviet period the peasant world was dismantled not only by urbanization and industrialization, but also by the heavy hand of repression, with the collectivization programme of 1929–32. Despite the return of some private plots thereafter, what was left of the peasantry had by mid-century been transformed into a rural proletariat. To be sure, alongside these pressures came a system of positive incentives: education, more rights for women, improved housing, sanitation, health care, and so on. But the main impact of the Soviet order on the peasantry was to destroy, for good and for ill, the traditions and life-world of this rural class—an outcome at stark variance with, for example, the fate of China’s peasant masses.footnote⁴

Second, there is the obviously more rapid disappearance of the propertied class after 1917. The aristocracy and landed elite was erased from the social landscape by the Revolution and Civil War; thereafter, apart from an outburst of entrepreneurialism under the New Economic Policy in the 1920s, there was nothing one could designate a bourgeoisie or even a mercantile class. Third, the rise of the category of ‘workers’. Although the October Revolution had been carried out in the name of the proletariat, industrial workers formed a relatively small proportion of the population in 1917, and shrank still further during the devastating Civil War that followed. The launching of forced-pace industrialization in 1928 brought a dramatic shift, however: between 1928 and 1937, industrial workers more than doubled in number, from 3.8 to 10.1 million; thereafter, their numbers continued to rise to the point where they dominated the ussr demographically.footnote⁵ This was not merely a process of quantitative growth—it was a qualitative transformation too: the Party actively sponsored the ‘making’ of an industrial working class, in the way it organized and incorporated labour, in everyday life and culture, in the realm of language and iconography.footnote⁶ Finally, we can also see the emergence of a layer of white-collar workers—‘sluzhashchie’ is the official term, essentially designating administrative personnel. This category also expanded rapidly after the advent of the fully planned economy, and eventually formed more than a quarter of the population.