Identity, Social Mobility and Ethnic Mobilization: Language and the Disintegration of the Soviet Union

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Lohse Marquardt
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Ethnic Mobilization ◽  
The Soviet Union

Identity, Social Mobility, and Ethnic Mobilization: Language and the Disintegration of the Soviet Union

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (7) ◽  
pp. 831-867 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle L. Marquardt
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
Negative Relationship ◽  
Ethnic Politics ◽  
Ethnic Mobilization ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Regional Population ◽  
Identity Based

The disintegration of the Soviet Union is an essential case for the study of ethnic politics and identity-based mobilization. However, analyses in this article demonstrate that commonly used measures of ethnic diversity and politically relevant group concentration show little consistent relationship with events of ethnic mobilization in Soviet regions during the period 1987-1992. In contrast, the proportion of a regional population that did not speak a metropolitan language has a consistently strong negative relationship with mobilization across these regions. In line with recent work on identity politics, I argue that a lack of proficiency in a metropolitan language marks nonspeakers as outsiders and hinders their social mobility. Regions with many of these individuals thus have a relatively high potential for identity-based mobilization. These findings provide further impetus for looking beyond ethnic groups in measuring identity-based cleavages, and indicate that language can play an important role in political outcomes aside from proxying ethnicity.

Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921-1934

1982 ◽  
Vol 87 (5) ◽  
pp. 1433
Author(s):  
Patrick L. Alston ◽  
Sheila Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
The Soviet Union

scholarly journals Stalled Social Mobility in Post-Soviet Russia

2018 ◽  
Vol 117 (801) ◽  
pp. 258-263
Author(s):  
Theodore P. Gerber
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Soviet Russia

“The fall of the Soviet Union sparked hopes that a Russian middle class would emerge and thrive, but so far it has not.” Second in a series on social mobility around the world.

Purges and Forced Retirements of Soviet Party Elites as Power Tools of Social Mobility

2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-345
Author(s):  
Katya Vladimirov
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Central Committee ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Party Elites ◽  
History Of ◽  
Power Tools ◽  
High Social Status

The article presents a tumulus seventy-year history of the top party élite, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CC CPSU), by profiling the anatomy of historical generations that embodied it. Five district generations in power and various political “teams” had been locked in ferocious battle for access to political capital, high social status, coveted positions, ranks, and privileges. Their survival and advancement demanded perseverance, bargaining skills, and ruthless elimination of competitors. Purges and forced retirement were essential power tools used in their generational struggle for power and status. The article discusses these methods of compulsory “exclusion” and offers innovative and revealing perspective on the nature of the Soviet political structure as well as on the techniques of its internal combat.

Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921-1934

1980 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 161
Author(s):  
John Dunstan ◽  
Sheila Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
The Soviet Union

Substate Nationalism

2020 ◽  
pp. 171-193
Author(s):  
Yoram Gorlizki ◽  
Oleg Khlevniuk
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Power Sharing ◽  
The Political ◽  
Party Membership ◽  
Ethnic Mobilization ◽  
Cultural Autonomy ◽  
Stalin Era ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Litmus Test ◽  
Formal Recognition

This chapter shows how formal recognition by the Soviet state of ethnolinguistic elites and cultures created opportunities for republican leaders to negotiate the problems of authoritarian control and authoritarian power sharing through ethnic mobilization. It looks at the early post-Stalin era that witnessed various campaigns to raise the political or cultural autonomy of national groups. The chapter describes the campaigns that rode on the coattails of the center's policy of reinvigorated indigenization and designed to promote ethnoterritorial elites and cultures. It talks about the litmus test of nationalism, in which an ethnoterritorial elite presented its interests as being opposed not only to those of other ethnoterritorial groups but also to those of the Soviet Union as a whole. It also explains ethnic mobilization that meant going over the heads of the party membership and appealing to the wider titular ethnic group.

Students, Workers, and Social Change: The Limits of Czech Stalinism

Slavic Review ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Connelly
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Support ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Elite Status ◽  
Working Class Students ◽  
Upward Social Mobility

Only a few years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, communists throughout eastern Europe began constructing new societies according to models imported from the Soviet Union. One of the most important tasks facing them in this enterprise was to establish firm bases of social support. For this, the Soviet model seemed straightforward: communists had to destroy the power of the old elites and recruit new elites from underprivileged social strata. In the 1920s the Bolsheviks had attempted to achieve these goals through higher education. By using affirmative action in student admissions and setting up worker preparation courses—the rabfaky—they broke the ability of the former upper classes to bequeath status and rapidly increased the numbers of workers and peasants among university students. Between 1927-28 and 1932-33 the number of working-class students doubled to half of all students, while the total number of students more than doubled. Issues of ideology aside, the logic of this transformation was simple: underprivileged social classes were likely to reward communists with loyalty in exchange for upward social mobility. The middle and upper classes, on the other hand, had considered it their prerogative to aspire to elite status. Their attachment to communism would always seem suspect, because in the best of cases it was based upon ideological commitment alone.

Soviet Federalism and Ethnic Mobilization

1991 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip G. Roeder
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Large Degree ◽  
Developmental Strategy ◽  
Ethnic Mobilization ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Public Politics ◽  
Political Success

Central among recent changes in the Soviet Union is an expanding and increasingly public politics of federalism. The Soviet developmental strategy assigned federalism and the cadres of national-territorial administration a central role in its response to the “nationalities question.” This strategy offers a key to three questions about the rise of assertive ethnofederalism over the past three decades: Why have federal institutions that provided interethnic peace during the transition to industrialization become vehicles of protest in recent years? Why have relatively advantaged ethnic groups been most assertive, whereas groups near the lower end of most comparative measures of socioeconomic and political success have been relatively quiescent? Why have major public demands—and the most important issues of contention between center and periphery—focused to such a large degree upon the details of the Soviet developmental strategy and upon federalism in particular

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