ABSTRACT
Until the late 1980s, the field of elite research – both theoretical and empirical – was still a kind of taboo in Russian social sciences. Although the field itself was recognized among scholars, and, for example, C. Wright Mills’ classical The Power Elite (1956) was published in Russian as early as 1959, the use of elite theories was limited to the so-called ‘critique of non-Marxist concepts’ (see Ashin, 1985; Burlatskii and Galkin, 1985). Recently, the situation has looked completely different. Since 1989, when a section on elite research was established at the Institute of Sociology of Russian Academy of Sciences (Steiner, 1997: 118), studies in this field have been rapidly expanded and quickly institutionalized. ‘Elite’ became a key word in political science and sociological discourse. Dozens of books and hundreds of articles on elites have appeared (for a bibliography, see Kukolev and Stykow, 1996: 109-113, 1998: 132-137; Steiner, 1997: 125-132; Duka, 2001). Dissertations on elites have been written, conferences on elites have been held, lecture courses on elites have been taught and even the first Russian textbook on ‘elitology’ has been published (see Ponedelkov and Starostin, 1998).
