Historical Social Structure and Attitudes Towards Protest: Evidence from Russia

• In Event: Protests in difficult conditions

Abstract

In recent years, protest has become an increasingly widespread—and potent—tool of the expression of citizen dissent. The middle class has featured prominently in recent analyses of protests in autocracies. In line with classic modernization theorizing, the expectation is that this is a stratum that is most likely to demand political openness and rule of law. Recent research has also highlighted significant sectoral differentiation in middle-class mobilization, stemming from autocrats’ ability to co-opt those working for the state. Yet, we still know relatively little about whether historically distinct sets of constituencies within the middle class differ in their attitudes toward protest and contention. Our paper takes on this challenge. We commissioned a survey from the Levada Centre, one of Russia’s most respected polling agencies. To our knowledge, we are the first scholars—and in what will be also Levada’s first—to ask questions specifically teasing out both the pre-Revolutionary and Soviet social ancestry of respondents. Our objective is to distinguish between what we theorize as a middle class nurtured more “organically” in the context of pre-Revolutionary Russian capitalist development; and one constituted “hegemonically” in the context of Soviet policies of social mobility. We find that those who report pre-revolutionary ancestry which we bracket under the rubrics of the “educated” or “legacy” bourgeoisie are significantly more likely to support protest and to report more pro-democratic attitudes. Nevertheless, the survey also reveals that when it comes to violence that may accompany protests, self-reported descendants of the pre-Revolutionary bourgeoisie are significantly less likely to endorse street contention. We explain the latter results with reference to Soviet-period repression against the former bourgeoisie.

Authors

• Tomila Lankina, London School of Economics and Political Science

• Alexander M. Libman, Freie Universität Berlin

• Katerina Tertytchnaya, University College London