Cultural and Educational Elite of the Russian Federation: Structural and Typological Analysis

Abstract

During major political transformations of political transit, the presence of cultural and educational elite representatives in supreme state bodies and political governance is crucial for legitimizing the new political order and the underlying political meanings and values. This article aims to examine the cultural and educational elite as an important part of Russia’s contemporary political process — a resource that political elites turn to when they need to generate and scale new value-­based ideas for implementing changes within the policy field. The study seeks to expand scholarly knowledge on effective technologies for constructing relevant socially significant meanings and the conditions for their dissemination in political space. Drawing on the author’s own research as well as on recent scholarly works, two key functions of the cultural and educational elite are identified: a legitimacy-­supporting function that preserves values accepted during the current stage of societal development, and an opposing function — that of a counter-­elite — which resists ongoing processes and strives for systemic change. A central mechanism examined in this study is the recruitment of cultural and educational elite members into the political field, where they convert their capital into political capital. The article introduces a new elite cohort — “taste-­makers” — comprising prominent bloggers, journalists, artistic directors of theaters, and film directors. A distinctive feature of this cohort is that while retaining their audience and transitioning into other status positions, the cultural and educational elite project their own public visibility and recognizability into the political space. This recognizability serves as social capital, measured through media airtime, tickets sold for events and concerts, and numbers of followers. Consequently, contemporary opinion leaders who, through their accumulated social capital and communication channels, disseminate new meanings and orientations — thereby reflecting them in the political field — can be regarded as belonging to the cultural and educational elite.