Tomila Lankina’s new monograph belongs to a line of research that studies the trajectories of the descendants of pre-capitalist elites in the twentieth century. Originally focusing on the aristocracy, scholarly attention later shifted to the bourgeoisie and the clergy. Lankina’s book is innovative compared to its predecessors: she uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to establish a correlation between the reproduction of formerly privileged groups and the type of political regime in the country.

Lankina studies the educated strata of imperial Russia and their long-term intergenerational strategies using the example of the city of Samara. All the educated strata are analyzed together: nobility, merchants, clergy, and the small bourgeoisie, meshchane, with particular emphasis on the latter. They intersected at schools and were tied by social networks, but social distinctions continued to be important. By including the meshchane, a more numerous group, Lankina is able to study statistical correlations between imperial and present-day Russia.

Civil society’s struggle for autonomy in the Russian empire laid the groundwork for its persistence after the revolution. Lankina recalls the role of professions in Russian history: under authoritarian rule, professional unions, congresses, and networks all contributed to preserving a certain measure of social autonomy. The same was true of urban civic activities. Lankina analyzes the archives of schools, self-government bodies, museums, and scientific and historical societies where educated townsfolk interacted. In the post-revolutionary period, there was no major structural change. Educational organizations still attracted citizens, and members of the former privileged estates were still central figures in their networks. After 1917, the formerly privileged strata used familiar methods of creating of autonomous spaces outside or inside the authoritarian state system. Lankina critically addresses Jurgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere, extending it and showing that the public sphere can be partially embedded in the institutional apparatus of the state.

The former bourgeoisie had three ways of obtaining high social status in Soviet society. The most obvious way of adaptation, typical of “organizational men,” was by preserving one’s social position in specialized professions, like medicine. The second type of integration, which Lankina titles “the pop-up society,” encompasses situations when a lack of a qualified workforce created multiple possibilities for literate citizens. Finally, a third type of integration, entitled “museum society” and based on a case study of the Samara Museum, describes the creation of professional niches by former elites.

Using the case study of one bourgeois family, Lankina shows that market values were deeply implanted in the conscience of big and small bourgeoisie. She attributes the statistical correlation between towns’ numbers of enterprises created in the 1980s–90s and the quantity of entrepreneurs in the pre-revolutionary period to the transmission of these values. She argues that in the towns where meshchane were more numerous before the revolution, greater support for democracy was observed a hundred years later.

Urban space also contributed to the social preservation of privileged groups. During the Soviet period, the historical center of Samara maintained its social prestige. The geographical concentration of the possessors of cultural capital amplified their influence in the city. In contrast, the workers district Bezymyanka remained a place of construction of workers’ identity. This spatial inequality also persisted in the country as a whole. The Gulag system reinforced the existing spatial partition of economic and human resources.

Most provocatively, the book argues that the Russian Revolution did not happen. Neither the great reforms of the 1860s nor the upheaval of 1917 and Stalinist industrialization could put an end to the split between the former illiterate serfs and the educated strata. Lankina criticizes the limits of the Marxist approach to Soviet history, proposing to use Weberian and Bourdieusian approaches instead. From that perspective, it is obvious that Soviet citizens of proletarian origins did not retain the same amount of symbolic and social capital as did the descendants of privileged strata.

Based on the Russian case, Lankina develops a theory of “social resilience,” which can be used for any country. The last chapter proposes a comparison between Russia, Hungary, and China, reformulating the book’s main argument more broadly. In countries where, by the time capitalism was established, conditions had been created for the reconversion of privileged estates into modern professions, these pre-capitalist elites were later resilient to revolutionary change; attempts at de-stratification from above could not subvert this system of inequality because it was rooted in the configurations of social networks and in institutional inertia.