ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the available evidence on social mobility in Soviet society. It is concerned with the fluidity of this society as reflected in: the extent of occupational changes between parents and children (intergenerational mobility); and the extent to which individuals are able to shift from one level of the occupational hierarchy to another within the course of their work careers (intragenerational mobility). The very concept of "social mobility," to the extent that it was recognized at all, was dismissed as "a concept of bourgeois sociology" linked to the theory of social stratification and as inapplicable to Soviet society. Studies of the social origins of specialists in rural areas reinforce the impression of extensive reliance on the offspring of manual strata to recruit managerial and technical staffs. The large-scale recruitment of individuals of manual social origins to fill higher-level nonmanual positions does not reflect any significant downward mobility among the offspring of intelligentsia families.
