THE FIELD OF POWER IN CONTEMPORARY RUSSIA – A PRELIMINARY DESCRIPTION
THE FIELD OF POWER IN CONTEMPORARY RUSSIA – A PRELIMINARY DESCRIPTION

Author(s): Katarzyna Chawryło
Subject(s): Politics, Sociology, Security and defense
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: capital; field theory; field of power; elite; Russia; social structure
Summary/Abstract: The article aims to describe the contemporary Russian political elite using the perspective of the field proposed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. A major challenge in the attempt to describe the Russian elite nowadays is the limited access to information about its members, compounded by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the resulting censorship. The perspective of the field, which so far has not been comprehensively applied to describe Russia’s socio-political reality, turned out to be of use, as it allows structuring deliberations on the elite and formulating a precise, scientific description. For the purposes of the research, open sources were used: official documents, information from the media, and expert reports. The institutional and hierarchical approach together with the author’s subject matter expertise were used to select 40 representatives of the narrow political elite in Russia as of 2022, who were subjected to a partial demographic and socio-biographical analysis. In the course of the research, it was proven that the selected group is quite homogeneous in terms of age, gender (with a crushing overrepresentation of men), and level of education. As for the structure of the field, several professional sub-fields were distinguished within it - mainly representatives of services, business, professional officials. The main feature linking these figures is the fact that they have President Vladimir Putin’s personal trust, which was identified to be the main force in the field. Given the key importance of the personal relations of individual members of the elite with President Putin, the weakening of his role in the regime, and especially his removal from office, would undermine the entire structure of the field of power in Russia.

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