This monograph discloses the estate-based social structure of contemporary Russia by way of outlining the principles of the USSR's peculiar estate system, and explaining the new social estates of post-Soviet Russia. Simon Kordonsky distinguishes and describes in particular the currently existing Russian service and support estates. He introduces the notions of a resource-based state and resource-based economy as the political and economic foundations for Russian society's estate structure. His study demonstrates, moreover, how the method of inventing and institutionalizing threats plays a dominant role in the mode of distribution of scarce resources in such a social system. The book shows fundamental differences between resource- as well as threat-based economies, on the one side, and traditional risk-based economies, on the other, and discloses what this means for Russia's future.

Dr. Simon G. Kordonsky is Professor of Public Policy as well as Head of the Department of Local Self-Government and of the Laboratory for Municipal Administration at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Kordonsky studied biology at Tomsk State University and worked previously as a researcher at Altai State University as well as the Russian Presidential Administration. He is the author of five Russian monographs and has published papers in, among other journals, Osteuropa, Strategic & Business Intelligence, Otechestvennye zapiski, Mir Rossii, Vek XX i mir, Kentavr, and Mikroekonomika. Kordonsky is also member of the editorial boards of the journals Voprosy obrazovaniia and Voprosy gosudarstvennogo i munitsipal'nogo upravleniia, as well as Chairman of the Expert Council of the Khamovniki Foundation for Social Research (www.khamovniky.ru). The author of the foreword: Dr. Svetlana Barsukova is Professor of Economic Sociology at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow.