LAUSR

discussed the role of families as transmission mechanisms for pre-communist education and ideas, Lankina shows that families were also crucial in shaping the demand for education, thereby facilitating the reproduction of precommunist elites. Furthermore, the discussion of social networks and professional incorporation strategies is an important and original contribution to explaining the remarkable ability of pre-communist elites (and ideas) to withstand decades of communist social engineering efforts. Of course, any work of this scope and theoretical ambition is likely to raise a number of questions. In terms of internal validity, I primarily wondered about two issues. First, I am not sure how to think about the primary dependent variable: Russian democracy. Even leaving aside the dramatic deterioration of the last two decades, post-communist Russia was at best a hybrid regime. And while things looked better in a few subnational enclaves, I am not sure whether the quantitative indicators used in Chapter 7 really capture democracy in the Russian context. The two main indicators—the effective number of candidates and the Vanhanen Index—capture competitiveness, which is essential for democracy. But given that these indicators are based on the first round of the 1996 presidential elections, in which Yeltsin’s main competitor was the Communist Party candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, and where two of his main challengers—Alexander Lebed and Vladimir Zhirinovsky—relied on authoritarian and nationalist appeals, it is unclear that a closer local-level result really means an endorsement of democracy, or simply more competitive authoritarianism. The one genuinely liberal democrat in that election—Grigory Yavlinsky—received only 7.5% of the vote, and his party (Yabloko) never topped 8% in successive parliamentary elections, and while this support was higher in areas with high historical shares of “educated estates,” it nevertheless suggests that support for liberal democracy in Russia was consistently below the population share of the educated estates (roughly 13.5%). This gap suggests that even among the educated and entrepreneurial descendants of the former Czarist elites, democratic support was not particularly high, and raises the possibility that such elites may provide the basis for greater inter-elite competition rather than genuine democratization. A second internal validity question arises from the ambiguity of the meshchane category, which combines occupational elements, education, and urban residence. While Lankina acknowledges and addresses this ambiguity, and the statistical tests attempt to disentangle some of these strands, it would have been useful to test explicitly the relative importance of occupational categories versus the related but distinct factor of pre-communist education/literacy. As with any single-country study, the question of scope conditions/generalizability looms large. The book partially addresses this issue by comparing Russia to two other (ex) communist countries (Hungary andChina) inChapter 10, which broadly confirms the correlation between the resilience of pre-communist elites and post-communist regime patterns. However, such cross-national comparisons also raise many other questions. For example, how would this theoretical framework account for the more democratic regime trajectories of Moldova compared to Russia, despite the lower pre-communist literacy and the greater decimation of Moldovan elites after the communist takeover? Similarly, how do we account for the significant recent democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland, two countries with the strongest and most resilient precommunist educated elites in the region? That being said—and this final point is admittedly personal and highly impressionistic—I found that the book’s primary theoretical and empirical argument, which focuses on the survival strategies of pre-communist elites after the communist takeover, “travels” very effectively beyond the Russian context. From the emphasis on education investments as a way to compensate for the loss of material capital, to the emphasis on family reunions and belonging to a “good family,” and even all the way to museum employment as a haven for marginalized former educated elites, the book brings to life in a theoretically fascinating and personally moving fashion, an important and often ignored dimension of life under communism. But while these stories are part of the personal baggage for many of us, Lankina’s book tells them at a larger scale, and shows how they help us to understand important aspects of post-communist politics.