SOCIAL MOBILITY IN RUSSIA DURING THE WARS, REVOLUTIONS, AND RADICAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE FIRST HALF OF THE XX CENTURY: DISCOURSES AND RESEARCH RESULTS
V.I. Shishkin, A.I. Savin
Institute of History of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IH SB RAS), Russia, 630090, Novosibirsk, Akad. Nikolaev str., 8
Keywords: social mobility, social channels and lifts, Russia, XX century, foreign historiography, domestic historiography
Abstract
This article analyzes the main trends and results of studies in social mobility in Russian society during the first half of the XX century in the national and foreign historiography. The founder of the theory of social mobility, P.A. Sorokin, formulated the basic idea that the multidirectional social mobility is a universal attribute of all social systems. Before Perestroika, social mobility as a subject of study was taboo in the Soviet Union, despite the fact that pace and results of social mobility in Russia had been unparalleled in world history. Western historians until the mid-1970s also ignored the subject of social mobility, because the dominance of the totalitarian model of Soviet society left no room for the analysis of social movements. A breakthrough scientific research on this topic was performed by the historians of the revisionist school in the United States, who paid particular attention to certain means of social mobility in the Soviet society which played an important role as a pillar of Stalinism. Besides, they actively studied a range of social, gender and ethnic groups with high mobility. However, in the recent years, influenced by the history-of-mentalities approach, Western researchers shifted to analysis of the identities mobility. Russian historians still remain outsiders in the study of social mobility in Russia. Nevertheless, there is a considerable amount of books and articles on mechanisms of social mobility that provided the downward trend of vertical mobility in the 1920s-1930s. As a result, the picture of social mobility was significantly deformed. This historiographic “skewness” is in need of serious adjustment through the identification and study of those social lifts that provided climbing up the social ladder in Russia in the first half of the XX century. Only an objective analysis of social mobility allows getting a realistic view of what was in fact a vector of social evolution of the country in the first half of the XX century.
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