Russia's Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Russian History

The Professions in Russian History

Harley D. Balzer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315285399
• Subtopic: Business General

This work describes the emergence of the professions in late tsarist Russia and their struggle for autonomy from the aristocratic state. It also examines the ways in which the Russian professions both resembled and differed from their Western counterparts.

1
Introduction

HARLEY D. BALZER

In postemancipation Russia and the Soviet Union professional specialists constituted the largest component of the nascent middle class. Before 1917 specialists were growing rapidly in numbers and played an important role in the political process, but an estate-based social structure and cleavages cutting across their occupational and social identities inhibited concerted political action. The primary goal of this volume is to provide a preliminary portrait of the development and expansion of Russian professions in the years before 1917.

Questions about the character of Russian professions have acquired an additional dimension with the demise of the Soviet political system. Policies adopted by the Soviet regime resulted in a massive increase in the number of specialists in the knowledge-based professions within a system where political controls and stringent deprofessionalization precluded collective action. Since 1991 the attempt to create a democratic polity in Russia has invited, if not demanded, the participation of the professional middle class.¹ Yet, as in the period before 1917, it has proved difficult for these groups to act in concert or to firmly establish a professional or middle-class identity. Exploring the history of Russian professions helps us to learn more about the professional specialists and the role they might play in the future. Russia’s professional intelligentsia provided many of the ideas and much of the support for perestroika. These communities of specialists might be expected to join Russia’s new commercial and industrial groups in supporting economic reforms and political change. But in the face of social change and economic crisis a danger exists that rapid downward social mobility could lead professional specialists to support more extreme political movements.

Approaches to the Study of Professions

Early studies of professions focused mainly on Britain and America and generally adopted an uncritical approach. The existence of professions was accepted as part of the natural order of things, and professional communities were portrayed as having the good of society among their highest values. The British literature has been described as “Whiggish.”² In America, despite a healthy skepticism in the work of some social critics, the dominant paradigm was provided by Talcott Parsons’s functionalist approach. Professions were seen to be ethically motivated and service-oriented.³ After World War II, the image of professionals as selfless public servants was called into question by scholars, many writing from a neo-Marxist perspective, who emphasized issues of conflict and power. In these analyses, professions seek to dominate the market for their services, relying on the state to regulate entry. While presented as actions to protect the public and guarantee proper standards of training and behavior, these professional programs also (or, for some analysts, primarily) are manifestations of self-interest and concern for status.⁴

Despite significant differences in their views about the motivation for and implications of professional programs, the functionalists and the radical critics developed a rough consensus in defining professions. The models derived from study of the Anglo-American experience emphasize cognitive, normative, and evaluative attributes: members of a profession share a knowledge base acquired through formal training; they adhere to standards of conduct reinforced by a socialization process emphasizing service; and the professions are self-governing, asserting that the professionals themselves are the most competent gatekeepers and arbiters of appropriate behavior. Training, socialization, and regulation are carried out through institutional structures including universities, specialized journals, and professional organizations. Scientific societies, study circles, and various informal groups also play a role in developing and maintaining professional identity.

Some scholars have amplified these criteria with longer lists of specific attributes.⁵ The elements of the definition they emphasize fluctuate in response to social, economic, and political conditions that manifest different forms in different national contexts. In an effort to transcend list making, Eliot Freidson has offered a more parsimonious definition: “I use the word ‘profession’ to refer to an occupation that controls its own work, organized by a special set of institutions sustained in part by a particular ideology of expertise and service. I use the word ‘professionalism’ to refer to that ideology and special set of institutions.” Freidson recognizes that in the way he uses the concept, it is probably limited to Anglo-American experience in a particular time period. Yet his call for a rebirth of professional theory invites broader comparisons.⁶

Scholars studying the professions may tend to overestimate their role. Harold Perkin elevated the professions to the central place in English social history.⁷ Burton Bledstein makes less grandiose but quite strong claims for their role in America.⁸ Geoffrey Cocks and Konrad Jarausch slip into formulations where a disembodied “professionalization impetus” becomes an actor on the historical stage.⁹ Harold Wilensky suggested the ultimate extreme in “The Professionalization of Everyone?”¹⁰

Placing on professions and professionalization a load the concepts cannot support impairs our understanding of history. Professionalization is not the single thread running through the fabric of modern society that will enable scholars to unravel and explain their material. It is an important phenomenon, indeed one of the dominant social processes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it must be viewed in the broader context of social history or it distorts more than it reveals. Professionalization cannot be accorded an existence separate from social-political environments and human actors.

But to reject excessive claims about the role of professions is not to reject the utility of the concept. Recent work emphasizes the situation of specialists functioning in the complex organizations characteristic of postindustrial society.¹¹ In this context, the crucial distinctions become those between manager and subordinate, salaried and nonsalaried labor, and the relationships inside and outside of the organization. Increasingly, the identity of being part of a large bureaucracy transcends professional identity.

Or does it? Are we not dealing with a situation of multiple identities in increasingly complex societies? Even professionals employed in large universities or corporations may derive a significant part of their identity from their professional role, and their professional community may provide an important forum for political expression. I tend to agree with Eliot Freidson regarding the significance of professions: they are not merely knowledge-based occupations embedded in large organizations. To comprehend diverse social and political contexts, the elements of perceived status and autonomy are crucial. No matter how completely the specialist’s activity is subsumed in a large organization, the professional specialist maintains a reference group and an identity (increasingly one of multiple identities) as a member of a profession. Professional identity may be a delusion that results in acquiescence to the condition of a “one-dimensional man”; it may be a status payoff that substitutes for material benefits; but it may also be a source of strength in confronting the organizational structures. Not enough attention has been paid to the enduring power of the professional specialist, even in seemingly rigid organizational settings.

Professions take on their greatest significance in the context of the intermediating structures crucial to democratic political development. Professional autonomy, rarely complete but also rarely completely obliterated, is one of the components of most democratic political systems.¹²

Professionalization is not a developmental model, and there is no ultimate resolution. Conflicts and the need for renegotiation of the arrangements are perpetual. At the same time that professions, the occupational environment, and the types of questions asked by scholars of the professions are all changing, the state, too, is changing. This gives the search for a “unified theory of professions” the quality of four-dimensional chess. Scholars coming to the problem from diverse perspectives based on different discourses are studying changing social and occupational structures in relation to state and administrative contexts that are themselves in flux.¹³

Professions and the State in Europe

Models based on British and American experience do not always lead us to the most important questions about professions in the Continental nations. In France, Central Europe, and especially in Russia, the relationship of professions to the state had a different character, stemming from their origins in systems of formal academic training administered by the government. Rather than independent professional groups seeking to invoke state authority to enforce their control over training and membership, the Continental pattern consisted of states fostering the professions through specialized educational institutions, with practitioners organized in state-sanctioned corps. While different in each national context and each profession, the professional programs inevitably involved a tension between establishing some degree of autonomy and enjoying the status, protection, and control over credentialing that the state provided. The model of the civil servant as bureaucratic modernizer was a powerful alternative to the model of the free professional.

Realization of professional agendas always implies some reliance on state power. At a minimum, the state guarantees professionals a monopoly vis-à- vis practitioners lacking proper credentials (in the name of protecting the public). In conditions where professionals perceive their role to be encouraging social transformation as well as performing professional services, the state may be viewed as both a serious obstacle and an opportunity; professionals may see in state power an important means to achieve their program, provided that state power can be harnessed to advance the professionals’ goals without unduly infringing their autonomy.¹⁴ When the state in the guise of bureaucratic modernizers advances its own program of development, there is a strong temptation to ignore autonomy in favor of (perceived) efficacy.¹⁵

Recent scholarship on professions in continental Europe clearly shows the important role played by the state and the complexity of professionals’ relationships with state power. In France, old elites first resisted the growth of professionalizing educational institutions and then sought (rather successfully) to restrict access to those institutions in ways favoring individuals from the traditional privileged classes. Introducing a volume on French professions, Gerald Geison decries the neglect of the state in studies of professions, attributing the lacuna to the “political cultures and traditions in which scholars are embedded.” He notes that “even powerful professional groups depend ultimately on the borrowed authority of the state.”¹⁶

Both Geison and Matthew Ramsey emphasize the role of the French state while underlining the importance of political culture and the history of individual professions. “In France, professional ‘autonomy,’ ‘power,’ and success virtually required dependence on the state.”¹⁷ Yet they also note that the character of the relationship and degree of dependence vary; physicians in France managed to retain considerably more independence than many other professions, for example engineers and scientists.¹⁸ These differences suggest a range of relationships between professions and the state in any national context that are subject to change over time.¹⁹

Similar judgments about the diversity of professional programs and the importance of longitudinal changes emerge from an examination of German professions. The German case is closer to the Russian experience geographically, culturally, and also in terms of political discontinuities. German professionals in the mid-nineteenth century strove to gain independence from the state while simultaneously seeking control over such mechanisms of government authority as the system of state examinations. By the end of the century, faced with competition for a limited employment market, many German professionals sought state protection to support their incomes and status. In the Nazi era, German specialists experienced severe deprofessionalization. Since World War II they have provided an example of relatively successful reprofessionalization in a context of increasing specialization and organizational bureaucratization.²⁰

Several scholars of the German professions suggest that the civil service bureaucracy developed an ethos and orientation essentially similar to Anglo-American professionalism.²¹ Gispen provides an extensive analysis of the basis for the similarities:

From a comparative historical perspective, the professions are not so much sui generis as just one version of a larger phenomenon that encompasses Weber’s bureaucracy as well: The rise of expertise and certification as specifically middle-class techniques for advancement and for legitimizing privilege, rank, and power (vis-à-vis aristocratic resistance and democratic pretensions alike), intertwined with ideologies of ‘c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Editor and Contributors
• Preface
• A Note on Dates, Archive References, and Transliteration
• Glossary
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Reflections on Russian Professions
• 3 The Engineering Profession in Tsarist Russia
• 4 Politics and Medical Professionalization After 1905
• 5 Professionalism and Politics: The Russian Feldsher Movement, 1891–1918
• 6 Professionalization and Radicalization: Russian Psychiatrists Respond to 1905
• 7 Professional Activism and Association Among Russian Teachers, 1864–1905
• 8 Professionalism Among University Professors
• 9 The Transfer of Legal Technology and Culture: Law Professionals in Tsarist Russia
• 10 The Limits of Professionalization: Russian Governors at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
• 11 Professionalism in the Ministerial Bureaucracy on the Eve of the February Revolution of 1917
• 12 Conclusion: The Missing Middle Class
• Index