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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Soviet Union
Index
Social mobility, or an individual's movement upward or downward
through the strata of society, has been facilitated in the Soviet
Union through changes in occupation, marriage, education, and
political or even ethnic affiliation. Nepotism and cronyism have
also played a significant role in social advancement. In addition,
social mobility has stemmed from geographic mobility, such as the
move of an agricultural worker to the city to work in industry. For
non-Russians, social mobility has also involved learning the
Russian language and culture.
Given the centralized and bureaucratic official structure of
the Soviet Union in 1989, citizens could not legally become wealthy
or achieve high social status outside official channels. Therefore,
the paths for advancement remained fairly fixed, and an
individual's upward progress was usually slow. In the past,
political purges and an expanding economy had created positions for
the ambitious. The faltering of the economy in the mid-1980s,
however, restricted upward mobility, and as of 1989 Gorbachev's
attempt to restructure the economy had not created new
opportunities for social mobility.
In the 1980s, downward mobility was less of a problem than it
had been during the Stalin era, when high-level government
bureaucrats were demoted to menial jobs. However, even though elite
positions had become more secure under Brezhnev, children of the
elite who lacked higher education did not necessarily retain their
parents' social position.
In 1989 social mobility tended to be "inter-generational"
(advancement to a social position higher than the one occupied by
parents) rather than "intra-generational" (advancement to a higher
social position during one's own adult life). Thus, social mobility
had slowed down. Soviet studies from the 1960s to the mid-1980s
also showed that children of manual laborers were less likely to
obtain high-level educational qualifications than children of
nonmanual laborers. Nearly four-fifths of the children of unskilled
manual laborers began their work careers at the same social level
as their parents.
Data as of May 1989
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