The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia

A devastating challenge to the idea of communism as a ''great leveller'' this extraordinarily original rigorous and ambitious book debunks Marxism-inspired accounts of its equalitarian consequences. It is the first study systematically to link the genesis of the ''bourgeoisie-cum-middle class'' Imperial Soviet and post-communist to Tzarist estate institutions which distinguished between nobility clergy the urban merchants and meshchane and peasants. It demonstrates how the pre-communist bourgeoisie particularly the merchant and urban commercial strata but also the high human capital aristocracy and clergy survived and adapted in Soviet Russia. Under both Tzarism and communism the estate system engendered an educated autonomous bourgeoisie and professional class along with an oppositional public sphere and persistent social cleavages that continue to plague democratic consensus. This book also shows how the middle class conventionally bracketed under one generic umbrella is often two-pronged in nature one originating among the educated estates of feudal orders and the other fabricated as part of state-induced modernization.