Estates and Razdatok (clarifying the definition of estates)

• Main Author: Rustem R. Vakhitov
• Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Published: Russian Academy of Sciences, Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology 2017-12-01
• Series: Социологический журнал
• Online Access: http://jour.fnisc.ru/upload/journals/1/articles/5532/submission/proof/5532-61-10934-1-10-20180701.pdf

Modern sciences about society, including sociology, consider estates to be something that belongs to the archaic traditional world. However, S.G. Kordonsky’s theory of estates argues that, on the contrary, estates still exist in modern societies. They are the groups which are granted various privileges by the state. Critics of Kordonsky’s theory say that it mistakenly likens estates to professional groups given special authority by the law (like police officers, administrators). Тhe author argues that Kordonsky’s understanding of estates is more complex and involves the connection of a class society with a certain form of economic distribution (razdatok). Razdatok is a form of management alternative to a market, based on the surrendering of material goods to the state and the distribution of them among social groups (O.E. Bessonova), as well as a state’s authoritarian and ideocratic nature. This article describes how such distribution forms the state officials and the merchant class, while indicating how members of such classes differ from professional managers (Weberian “rational bureaucrats”) which exist in a society of market and classes.The article also describes the main estates in Russian society during its various historical stages: prerevolutionary (nobility, clergy bureaucracy, industrialists, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie, workers), Soviet (Party elite (“nomenclature”), party ideologues and propagandists, teachers, engineers, loyal creative intellectuals, workers, soviet peasants (members of “kolkhoz”), technical personnel) and post-Soviet (“service oligarchs”, employees of security services (“siloviki”), “state employees”, “people”).In conclusion, considered is such an issue as the reasons for the reproduction of Russian society’s class structure, despite several waves of modernization. The most important reason is a lower intensity of resources in an estate-based society, in contrast to a democratic class society with a ramified bureaucratic apparatus.