ABSTRACT
The middle class "problem" in Russia and elsewhere is ultimately whether its class position will dispose it to politics favoring labor and the left, or to the more conservative politics of the political elite. Although the phrase is popular in political discourse throughout the West, there is no universally agreed-upon definition of the "middle class." Professionals comprise the nucleus of the middle class everywhere, but the Russian professional class is made up mostly of classical professionals in the primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors of the economy, not in the modern information processing quaternary sector. Sociologists of the 1940s and 1950s saw the essential flaw in the argument, namely, that modern industrialized economies were not polarizing but rather evolving toward a huge "middle mass" whose class position was in between workers and owners. "The Russian middle class is increasing first and foremost on the basis of a medium qualified workforce whose members are engaged in routine non-physical labor".
