VADIM BELOTSERKOVSKY
47
doms, including the freedom for sociological research , are lacking in
the USSR, judgments about its society and people can only be approxi–
mate, based on selected data, the breadth and objectivity of which
depend on the personal experience of the researcher and many other
circumstances. With a ques tion like nationalism, however, sociology is
not reliabl e either. Only history can judge.
On the basis of my experience, I have come to believe that at the
present time there are three Russian nations. The first is the peasantry,
which now constitutes about twenty-five percent of the Russian ethnic
population of the USSR and is rapidly decreasing on account of
migration to the cities and the industrialization of agriculture. I know
little about the attitude of the peasants to the ques tion of nationalism ,
but it is clear that the social and political future of Russia and the
USSR will not depend on the village.
The second nation consists of people from the sphere of service,
commerce, the trades-low-level white-collar workers, and blue-collar
workers in service industries. For brevity I call this the service sector. Its
proportion is about twenty percent, but is bound to increase .
The third nation is made up of workingmen, technicians,
engineers, and industrial office workers. The proportion is about fifty
percent, not counting workers in the service industries or agriculture.
This sector is increasing and although its overall growth is bound to
slow down, the growth of the engineering group within it will
continue to accelerate.
Of these groups, the most important is the " factory nation" -the
workers and engineers.
In
the USSR this sector has a solidarity it
possesses nowhere else, the result of long-standing and specifically
Soviet conclitions. The factory engineers and technicians come mainly
from the working mili eu. They live in almost identical conditions and
are not better off than the workers (rather worse), and they are subject
to
even greater exploitation because they have more responsibility and
are at the focal point of all the absurclities of the system, the center of
authoritarian, bureaucratic anarchy.
If
anything distinguishes the
factory engineers from the workers, it is a greater clissatisfaction wi th
the system. Of course the factory engineers are better educated.
In
sum,
the engineers and technicians simultaneously make the sector as a
whole intellectual and radicalize it.
The most important element in the consciousness of the people of
this sector seems to me to be their increasing understanding that
authoritarianism cannot bring an effecti ve and just social order. And
factory people, like no one else, have an interest in order. For that
