Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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I want to do a simple socioeconomic Mottizen survey: what class are you and why do you think that?
Definitely not upper, as I have to work for a living (there are no additional cultural requirements in Russia, as we have spent 70 years as the USSR).
Not working class, either, as I have a CNR job.
Lower upper middle, I guess? There are always UMC people richer than me (business owners, senior managers, corrupt public officials), that can buy a house with cash, but I can buy a new car with cash.
In all seriousness, can you genuinely not tell whose great-grandfather was an aristocrat and whose was a subsistence farmer? Or is it just no longer relevant / not considered polite to notice?
The number of people with aristocratic great-grandfathers is vanishingly small. I'd say 99% of the upper class left Russia during the civil war, along with a sizable chunk of the middle class. The ones that remained had to start from zero, as their property was confiscated. Or less than zero, as Soviet affirmative action discriminated against them.
In the 90's the nouveau riches started looking for their noble roots but realized that was fake and gay. The best roots a Russian can expect to find are all in the 20th century: a military hero, a party functionary, an NKVD officer, a scientist or an engineer working on a strategic project.
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I’m sure people can still tell, but Former People by Douglas Smith makes the case that by the slow opening up of Soviet society in the 1970s the actual, titled aristocracy had been so totally destroyed as an identity by so many successive periods of purges, internal transfers, re-education, the gulag, the war and intermarriage that it didn’t really exist any more outside of maybe some early emigrant families who left in 1917-1921 that keep or kept a vague recollection of it as a cultural thing. Kulaks and gentry (and to some extent minor urban and provincial bourgeoisie) were obviously much greater in number and their descendants are still relatively powerful and disproportionately overrepresented in the Russian and Chinese elite. And Smith does end with an anecdote about the descendant of one princely family whom he meets in early 2010s Moscow making a fortune in the oil business or something like that.
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