From the editor

When preparing this issue, we encountered an unusually high level of mutual misunderstanding within our small team. In the course of the work, misunderstanding only grew, and this is indirect confirmation that the problems of social mobility in modern Russia are extremely acute. Those who are hotter and more radical stood and stand that the country is in a severe socio-economic crisis, one of the consequences of which is the complete destruction of traditional mechanisms and channels of social mobility. As an example, they cite the once at the very least working chain “school - university - career”, which today has broken up into separate, and, moreover, very rusty links. School education is formally and substantively in a state of continuous reform, higher education is being devalued at an alarming rate, the first and second do not correlate with employment opportunities and career growth. That is, today all previously known and time-tested “recipes” for achieving a high level of well-being, social weight and personal satisfaction have lost their force. Happiness, in other words.

The other part of the editorial board is not inclined to dramatize the situation: they say that today much more comfortable societies than ours are facing a crisis of social mobility, and therefore it is pointless to engage in self-flagellation and look for some specifically Russian causes of trouble.

The former blame everything on the distributive, resource-based nature of the Russian economy and the class structure of our society - in such conditions, vertical mobility is directly related to belonging to a particular corporation or class. That is, it does not imply equality of conditions “at the input”. The latter, agreeing that mobility in Russia works selectively, consider this quite natural - there are never enough sweet gingerbreads for everyone, especially today, in the midst of a global crisis that has by no means reached its peak. So there will soon be even fewer gingerbreads, and so far no one in the world has figured out how to balance the multitude of gingerbreads with the multitude of their lovers.

There are, however, still others—a small group, so to speak, of eschatological optimists. In their opinion, we are living in a time of crisis of truly unprecedented proportions, and a total revision of fundamental ideas about the goals, methods, directions and actual value of social mobility is inevitable. Perhaps the upward direction should not be the only desired direction of movement. Who proved that “sideways” or “downwards” is worse? In other words, is it really so obvious that achieving harmony is possible only by bringing possibilities into line with desires, and not vice versa - desires in line with possibilities?

There was often a nostalgic note in the discussions. It turned out that - who would have thought! — not everyone was able to get rid of the longing for the supposedly effective Soviet social ladder “school - institute - engineering technology - party - leader (scientist, academician)” or “school - vocational school - mechanic - party - leader”. And the Soviet-American formula “who was nothing will become everything” retained its charm for many. And this despite the fact that no one has any longing for the Soviet “in general”. However, there is a longing for a society in which a good craftsman, engineer, lawyer, and even more so a teacher and doctor, are much more respected than a clerk or sales manager. Why in place of what had collapsed in the system of reproduction of social structures, nothing healthy arose, and whether this is only our problem - this is the question that fully faces us.

Ultimately, the editors’ timid attempt to bring different ideas about an achievement-oriented society under a common denominator predictably failed. And yet we present to the reader the fruits of our efforts.

By the way, the author, who was supposed to write an article for this volume entitled “A non-standard (unattainable) version of the modern social order”, having agonized over the text, went off to pick mushrooms without producing anything. Thus, in a sense, he demonstrated that unattainability is the most natural type of mobility for us.