Tomila Lankina will discuss her book in progress for the general reader, To Live For Freedom: A History of Dissent in Russia, under contract with Penguin Press in the UK and Public Affairs in the US. The book surveys 400 years of Russian history from the religious divisions in the seventeenth century to the anti-Putin protests in the present. It argues that to understand dissent, we need to understand the peculiarities of historical social structure and social divides in Russia, specifically the sosloviye (Stand) and the classification of social groups into legal categories of peasants, clergy, urban groups, and, at the top of the social pyramid, nobility, personal and hereditary. The book builds on Lankina’s previous academic book, which she will also discuss in the talk, entitled The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2022). Both books challenge accepted notions that communism was a “great leveler” that destroyed Imperial society and created a new social order. Lankina argues that the Tzarist legacies of social divisions continue to matter as we try to make sense of apparent support for autocracy in Russia and the apparently small-scale nature of challenges to the regime and the war against Ukraine.

About the speaker

Professor Lankina has worked on democracy and authoritarianism, mass protests and historical drivers of human capital and political regime change in Russia and other countries; she has also analysed the propaganda and disinformation campaigns in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and aggression in Ukraine. Her latest research is on social structure and inequality. A short video on her book, which challenges the narratives of the Bolshevik Revolution as a great social watershed is also available. Her publications have appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, World Politics, The Journal of Politics, Comparative Politics, Demokratizatsiya, Europe-Asia Studies, Post-Soviet Affairs, Problems of Post-Communism among others. She is also author of Governing the Locals: Local Self-Government and Ethnic Mobilization in Russia (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); and Local Governance in Central and Eastern Europe, with Anneke Hudalla and Hellmut Wollmann (Palgrave and University of Oxford St. Antony's Series, 2008). Her latest book The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle Class (Cambridge University Press 2022) is on the long-term patterns of reproduction of social structure in Russia from the Tzarist times to the present and on why these legacies matter for democracy, development and social inequalities.

About the Löwenthal lecture series

The Richard Löwenthal Lectures are a series of annual public lectures given by renowned scholars on Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space at the Institute for East European Studies. Richard Löwenthal (1908-1991) was a political scientist and professor at the Freie Universität Berlin from 1961-1974. He was a socialist who was involved in the resistance against the Nazis and, after returning from exile, carried out research on totalitarianism, National Socialism and the politics in Eastern Europe.