Social Elites in Late Imperial Ekaterinburg: A Program for Historical and Demographic Research

Abstract

This article develops a theoretical basis for studying the socio-demographic evolution of elites in local/urban historical communities. The authors analyzed the methodological and terminological apparatus used in modern elite studies and formulated the concept of “social elite” based on synthesizing the civilizational aspects of elite theory and modernization theory. The social elite is understood as a minority that is a reference group for the rest of society in the sphere of socio-demographic practices. A fruitful study of such an object is realistic only by employing mass nominative sources that recorded demographic events in individual lives. The most important nominative source which contains demographic and, in addition, social information about the demographically representative communities of imperial Russia, are metricheskie knigi - parish vital events records. The potential of this type of source is most effectively realized by transcribing the information into databases for subsequent quantitative analysis. The research was carried out based on the URAPP - “Ural Population Project” - a comprehensive electronic resource containing information from the Orthodox parishes records in Ekaterinburg for 1880-1919, now extended to about 57 000 entries. The initial adaptation of the proposed model to the historical context of late imperial Ekaterinburg enabled us to identify a community of townspeople - the parish of the Orthodox Epiphany Cathedral - that was more modernized than the rest of the city. Concentrating the research focus on socio-demographic processes among the parishioners of this community at the individual level, will in the future make it possible to represent more fully the evolutionary mechanisms of the social elite in the late Imperial Russian city. The proposed scheme can be used to study the problems of Russian social history in the late 19th - early 20th centuries, primarily to identify the agents driving the socio-demographic modernization. © 2021 Institute of History and Archeology of the Ural Branch of RAS. All rights reserved.