No abstract

This article represents the first stage of a research project dedicated to analyzing the structuration of Russian society throughout the period since the mid 1800’s and until this day. The timeline for part one includes the period up until 1917, while part two will be dedicated to Soviet and post-Soviet times. This article utilizes the methodology of A. Giddens, who suggested using the term “structuration” in order to analyze social relationships in space and time. This methodology implies examining structuration processes through the lens of those studies which were conducted during periods when radical shifts were occurring within the structure of Russian society. The main event which defined the direction for social change turned out to be the emancipation of the serfs in the Russian Empire, which lead to shifts in the population’s structure: accelerated development of a working class, social transformations in the village, and the advancement of internal migration in Russia. The article shows that in Russia these processes were accompanied by science, which included official agencies conducting population censuses, studying the composition and working conditions at factories and plants (this function was carried out by plant and manufactory inspectorates), as well as studies conducted by scientists and practitioners. The works of Nikolai Kalachov, N. Flerovsky, Evgeny Pogozhev, Mykhailo Tuhan-Baranovskyi and others aided in developing detailed social characteristics of workers and their position in the structure of society and at work. Studying the village (and consequently the largest social class – the peasants) was the prerogative of provincial councils. Comprehensive monographic studies were conducted by Piotr Semionov, Vassily Pokrovsky, Vassily Orlov, Piotr Chervinsky, Fedor Shcherbina, as well as other researchers. The article shows that the population’s structuration at the turn of the century in regards to the territorial aspect depended on resettlement and internal migration to a significant degree. Remarkable studies of this process were conducted by Denis Davydov, Evgeny Anuchin, Isaac Hourwich, Ivan Yamzin and other Russian scientists. Aside from scientists, practitioners also took part in these studies. The Russian intelligentsia actively partook in field research. The educated class’ efforts made it possible to attain valuable data on society’s structure, on the state of social relationships in Russia, migration processes, and the social characteristics of society’s key structural elements – peasants and workers.

The article considers the Russian civilization as a socio-cultural community that includes different civilizational formations, the fact that determines its heterogeneous nature. An indicator of the heterogeneity of a society is its social structure, with civilisational rifts present - such an opposition of individual structural elements that has a civilizational character. In modern Russia, three civilizational rifts can be recorded. The first of them is based on the existence in the country of different levels of technical and technological development and, accordingly, of the nature and content of laborur of the population. The second rift is due to the material differentiation of the society: from the standard of living (on the threshold and beyond the poverty threshold) to the possession of multibillion fortunes, that leads to a deep difference in the quality of life of the population, that is an attributive feature of various civilizations. The third rift is related to the historically uneven development of the regions. Along with the regions that have entered or are already at the informational stage of development (they are in minority), most of the regions are at the industrial stage, and in some regions, a pre-industrial agrarian society with stable traditional values ​​still prevails. Accordingly, informational, industrial and traditional subcivilizations coexist in the vastness of Russia. Property relations are considered among the significant factors of civilizational development. Property relations are first of all economic and juridical (legal) relations. Property as a social relation carries the historically stipulated content of the moral norms, justice, individual and social benefit. Property is embodied not only in legal forms, but also in customs, cultural patterns, habits, types of thinking and behavioral models. In Russia, the property right of an individual has always been oriented towards "internal justice", correlated in the public and individual consciousness with the prevailing ideas of the proper. Whereas in Western civilization there has been entrenched the priority of public relations based on the protected by law private interest of an individual. The reorientation of property relations in Russia to the Western model, including in the memory of our contemporaries, has not been a success due to the traditionally strong etacratic influences, the dominance of the “power-property” relationship.

This article is an extension of a series of works dedicated to the shaping of Russian society’s structure. The author’s reasoning is based on the assumption that, when evaluating changes in the structuration of Russian society over a long period of time – from the mid-1800’s and until today, which is the focus of the series of articles we mentioned – one should bear in mind that the most radical and, in many respects, catastrophic shifts occurred as a result of two groundbreaking events – the Bolshevik coup of 1917 and the collapse of the Soviet Union with the consequent transition to a market economy, which took place during the 1990’s. Both of these occurrences disrupted the evolutionary development of Russian society, and caused social shifts which cannot be definitively assessed, with them having radically changed society’s structuration. Influenced by these events, the country’s social composition underwent some fundamental changes, as did the people’s life-worlds, relationships between different social groups and layers of the population, and finally interactions with the new elites that sprouted from these social crises. In this article, which deals with processes that took place during the 1920’s and 1930’s, the author once again relies on the methodology of A. Giddens’, who suggested using the theory of structuration to analyze social relationships in space and time. Structuration processes are examined through the lens of studies conducted during that period, in the heat of the moment, so to speak. Even when taking into account the political restrictions of the time, you can still trace how exactly contemporary scientific studies and statistical research reflected those social processes, including the structuration of society. This article utilizes the works of P. Sorokin, A. Rashin, L. Minz, A. Khryasheva and S. Prokopovich, among other researchers, as well as materials from the 1897, 1926 and 1937 population censuses. The article is limited to the period from the beginning of the century and up until the 1920’s and 1930’s, and consequently the studies that were conducted during that period.