Historical CrossClass Alliances in AntiRegime Mobilization: Case of Russia

• In Event: Public Attitudes and Political Behavior in Times of Conflict

Abstract

This paper utilises a new author-assembled historical dataset; and relies on a survey experiment to analyse the implications of historical structures of inequality for cross-class alliances in political mobilization in post-Soviet Russia. We argue that rather than obliterating, the Bolshevik regime enabled the conservation of the social structures of the ancien régime. Because social enclosure resulted in historically entrenched patterns of social inequality, which continued to be in evidence even as the Soviet state sought to obliterate the vestiges of the past social structure, the potential for generation of inter-class alliances in anti-regime protest mobilization and civic activism is compromised. We begin by analyzing the links between pre-communist estates, communist-era modernization and social stratification in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia; and between social structure and spatial variations in development and democracy in Russia’s regions. Although historical scholarship on the structure of estates—distinguishing between the nobility, clergy, the urban estates of merchants and the meshchane and the rural peasant estate—in imperial Russia is substantial, research on communist politics and society is virtually silent on the nuances of the gelling of this relic of the tsarist past into Soviet categories of class. We perform a battery of statistical tests on author-assembled district-level tsarist-period, soviet and post-Soviet data on socio-economic development and social structure and demonstrate the “sticking power” of past patterns of modernization and social development. Next, we rely on an original framing experiment in Russia using the country’s most credible independent polling agency, the Levada centre. The survey experiment aims to identify the causal impact of information about the social composition of a protest movement on protest propensity in a non-democracy. In framing the protests as exclusive to a single class alone, or cross-cutting, survey frames aim to prompt respondents to focus on a different set of considerations when forming opinions about the protests and their own propensity to engage in mobilization.

Authors

• Tomila Lankina, London School of Economics and Political Science

• Katerina Tertytchnaya, University College London