Social Mobility in Contemporary Russia: Empirical Approaches and Limitations

The article examines social mobility in contemporary Russia as one of the central questions of stratification sociology. Drawing on the classical distinction between upward and downward, intergenerational and intragenerational mobility, it analyzes theoretical models that link mobility to education, occupational structure, and social origin. Particular attention is paid to how the Soviet period and the transformations of the 1990s affected opportunities for social advancement and the consolidation of advantages within families. The paper addresses methodological problems of measuring mobility, including the choice of occupational classification, the treatment of age, and differences in data access. Based on an analysis of published empirical studies, it shows that education is an important but not the only channel of mobility, and that regional and gender differences substantially affect its scale. The conclusion discusses the limitations of existing estimates and the prospects of panel data, which allow individual trajectories to be tracked over time. The study draws on scholarly literature and survey data.