Shvaya A. (2020) Tendentsii v transformatsii rossiyskikh elit: novyye podkhody i interpretatsii [Trends in the transformation of Russian elites: new approaches and interpretations]. Zhurnal sotsiologii i sotsialnoy antropologii [The Journal of Sociology and Social Anthropology], 23(5): 225–238 (in Russian).

Текст статьи на сайте журнала URL: http://jourssa.ru/sites/all/files/volumes/2020_5/Shvaya_2020_5.pdf (дата обращения 20.02.2021)

Abstract

The paper presents the analytical state of Russian elitology and a review of scientific reports that were presented in St. Petersburg at the Eighteenth All-Russian Seminar Sociological Problems of Power Institutions in the Context of Russian Transformation, organized by the Sociological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences with the participation of the Russian Association of Political Science. The author of the work problematizes and reflects on the main issues of Russian elitology. Concludes that the presented reports were addressed both to general topics in the study of elites (recruitment issues, relations between federal and regional power groups, power dispositions of local elites, etc.), and to more specific problems that are weakly embedded in the established range of issues of modern Russian elitology. Proceeding from this, the lectures were ordered in the following logic: the first block contains speeches that belong mainly to the second of the indicated categories and represent rather the discursive dimension of the elites; the next group of reports includes studies addressing the also poorly developed topic of leadership, leading to a discussion of key concepts; the third block includes reports united by a common problematic of relations between federal and regional power groups, as well as those that reveal new patterns of structuring and prospects for consideration of the regional elite; in the end, studies of agents of power redistribution (mainly at the level of local elites) are highlighted. Thus, it can be noted that the reports presented at the scientific seminar are structured both according to the principle of novelty of interpretation, and in accordance with the tendencies highlighted in them.