When we hear 'Russian Revolution', we think about destruction,
decimation, obliteration.
We don't think in terms of continuities, reproduction and resilience.
When I found an archive
about a large merchant family on the Volga, their lives,
and then what happened to them after the revolution –
that was just mind boggling.
It completely changes how we look at the communist experience.
In Stalin's Russia,
so many members of the old bourgeoisie were hounded, persecuted.
They could lose their lives just for being quote-unquote
"bourgeoisie" in the Marxist scheme of things.
People were afraid to keep records because they could lose their lives
for simply being on the wrong side of the revolution.
And they destroyed records.
There's absolutely no paperwork.
The only reason why this archive was preserved
is because people who stayed in Russia in the 1920s and 1930s
were sending to the part of the family who emigrated to America.
That's why this archive is amazing, because it gives us the rich texture
and the context of how people survive.
The Neklutin Archive has all sorts of really interesting snippets,
a vast trove of photographs,
letters that are full of agony and at the same time
full of a spirit of life marriages, births, deaths.
betrothals, family gossip, and reading more,
there are receipts, remittances, packages
that were sent at the height of Stalinism.
Of course, even within that family, there were people
who were sent to the gulag. There were people who were executed.
But my book calls attention to the values that these people preserved
and how it would be erroneous for us to call these people Soviet people.
This is an untold story.
This is an untold story about the Russian middle class.
We all know about the Tsars.
We all know about the collectivised peasantry.
We know about repressions in the gulags.
We know almost nothing about merchants, meshchane, clergy.
We think they simply disappeared.
But one insight from my book is people don't simply disappear.
Imperial Russian society
was rigidly stratified into estates.
The system survived all the way until 1917.
It was so rigid and so densely permeated all aspects of social life
that it has been likened to the caste system in India.
So it divided society into peasants
at the very bottom, the vast majority of the population.
Then there were at the very top,
the hereditary aristocracy and the personal nobles.
Then there were clergy, and then there were the urban groups,
which we know very little about. We know about the merchants.
But the other group were these mysterious, meshchane.
And actually, after peasants,
they were the largest group,
but they have been completely airbrushed out of
historical works.
Political science works.
Few people have written about estates because this is just
like Tsars, and their palaces, and the Romanovs,
this is one of those things that people say, "Well, it's been destroyed",
and my analysis completely debunks that because they didn't disappear.
And when the Bolsheviks came to power
and they had to fulfill their fantastical proclamations
about building a new society, industrialising the country,
elevating it out of the depths of illiteracy and poverty.
Guess who they had to work with?
They very quickly realised that they needed teachers, they needed doctors.
And where did these people come from?
These were the clergy, the meshchane, the merchants and the nobles.
And that's why I identify them as the core
of the imperial bourgeoisie, but also the Soviet middle class.
My book is a cautionary tale that shows us that even in the greatest
levelling experiments of the 20th century,
the structures of inequality are extremely resilient
because people transmit values within families.
You can take away somebody's palace or make them pay more taxes.
You cannot take away their human capital, their knowledge,
their values. You cannot simply
take it away from one person and give it to another one.
And this is the crux of what I'm finding.
This is not something that policymakers would like to hear because it precludes
easy and facile solutions to dealing with inequality.