[MUSIC] Hello, here you are, moving into Week 6 of the course Understanding Russians, Contexts of Intercultural Communication. And this week we'll be talking about professional and occupational contexts of intercultural communication with Russians. This week we'll have a really diverse agenda, because the topic that I have put together really involves different views on society and values that determine intercultural communication issues. So this diverse agenda will include, first, looking at the organizational culture from inside the organization. Not at organizations from the point of view of the society and government as we did last week but from inside, looking at the levels and functions of organizational culture and how they influence interactions between people with different cultural backgrounds. It will involve organizational communication in Russia aspects such as flows and networks of the information flow, use of language. The next topic will take us to discussing social aspects, so to say. Occupations and social strata in modern Russia. And the central topic here, probably the most controversial will be the issue of what is middle class in Russia. More specifically, we will touch up on variety of professions and professional discourses also characteristic of today discourse. And the last topic as I plan it for this week will be discussing intercultural partnerships in education. Looking at one case of international degree program that I participated. Now we will move to discussing the occupational format, social strata. And the question arises, does occupation actually matter in intercultural communication? I believe that it does, and it actually is based on a lot of sociological research that deals with intercultural communication issues. Then if we decide that we move on this, that we start this road, then the question is what is important to know about Russian social classes? And actually what is a social class, If understood broadly? Because of course I will not go into details of [COUGH] specific sociological issues. It's a really much-debated topic of what is social class and various theories, so this is not about it. We understand social class in, so to say, rough terms, it's a group of people that has its certain what, is it discourse community determined by their occupation, or is it a discourse community determined by the income values? So, these things may not necessarily coincide or even overlap and this is exactly the picture that we probably will see when we start to talk about the Russian middle class. What else might be important in discussing discourse communities as determined by the social class, region? Russia is a very vast country and the regional differences in it starting from Kaliningrad to the far east are immense. But still, it is no question that this is all going to be considered as Russian cultural media or Russian cultural universe. Education is also a very important [COUGH] feature that really may divide people. And then, it's both not just the level of education but it's the type of education like technocrats, and people involved in humanities, or in social sciences. This all creates different mindsets that may reflect In the communication across discourse community boundaries. And one more topic or feature that is especially important in modern Russia in its newest history is the experience abroad. The representatives of this or that social group might have had. This experience starting from just basic tourism, spending vacations abroad, up to working abroad, getting education abroad, really influences mindsets of representatives of Russian culture, especially after it's just one generation since the Iron Curtain had been removed. Then, we need to look at how the things were, so to say, before this newest modern Russian history started. So a few words about social stratification and new elites in the post-Soviet Russia. We'll start with what were the classes determined by the late Soviet society. Officially, the Soviet societal structure consisted of working class, the Russian word for it was [FOREIGN], which is in a way wrong because [FOREIGN] are those people who are robbed of everything, of any material belongings. But working class as it was defined in the Soviet Union officially was not robbed of material goods, but they were rather scarce. Then rural residents or more specifically agricultural workers because not everyone who lived in the rural areas were agricultural workers. And the Soviet word for that was [FOREIGN] because people were working in a special cooperative communities where much of what the production and the distribution were governed by the authorities, by the leaders of this corporative which was called, [FOREIGN]. And intelligence, the third, well class, or how that was cut, an intermediary class were basically people who didn't belong to the first two were put. But a very important group of people, which is called [FOREIGN] was not of course, part of the official Soviet system of social classes. But it did exist in reality and it included CPSU which means communist party of the soviet union government establishment. And this was an important group, actually this was the political elite that ruled the country that enjoyed certain very specific privileges, used the system. And although, within exactly that group of people, the dissent and tendencies and ideology that later led to the collapse of the Soviet Union was also born. It was in the descend not related probably to very idealistic motives but just the understanding or the feeling that the life was not going as actually it was meant, not enjoying realization of those goals that people may have in their lives. So basically, these working class, agricultural workers wherefore slightly overlapping parts of the Russian society in the Soviet times before the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the newest modern history of Russia, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, we of course immediately saw emerging new groups that were determining how Russian landscape, social landscape, would look. And the first would be business people because entrepreneurs study to show up, because the former system of economy has been destroyed. The new free market economy was supposed to emerge, and then of course the people who would be the leaders of this process, the agents of this process, also emerged as a group. But they came from three different sources and now I'm talking about the early post-Soviet period of the 90s. Later research showed that more or less they were coming from three sources, more or less equal in their size. First were former party officials, former nomenclatura who had access to various levels of getting resources, money, ability to become the owners of the new the property of what was supposed to start the Russian economy. The former directors, the people who were doing something and directing something. And as a result they got the right, well, probably certain and very suspicious right to have it after they were doing this. So former nomenclatura was part of this new business people, business elite later you might say. Then actually criminals who were not working overtly, legally in the former Soviet Union but had accumulated a lot of resources. And actually this shade economy, that probably staying partly in the shade, in the gray zone, but emerged as a new business. And then also technical intelligentsia, mainly technical intelligentsia entrepreneurs, those were the people who also, because it was also at the wake of the new technological revolution with the telecommunications and the web communications, businesses coming to life. They were the ones who possessed enough technical knowledge to start their enterprise, start their companies, small companies first and then growing. Some of them really grew rather big, and that was the third source of creating a new class of business people. We need to, from the very beginning, to make a difference between big business and small business. I know it's important everywhere, because these are two different, so to say, crowds of people, with partly differing values, goals, abilities, impact on the society and so on and so forth. But in Russia it had this specific coloring because the privatization that took place was felt by the majority of the society as something extremely unfair. And probably fairness is really not the best criteria for describing the absolutely necessary and painful procedures that were taking place in the society, that actually allow to avoid humanitarian catastrophe. Like making the prices free, freeing the prices and immediately rising of course problematic situations for many people. But still this was the situation in Russia, so big business and small business. The word Oligarch that actually corresponds more or less to the English word tycoon has been a bad word from the very beginning. It's a bad word in Russian now. But it's been like that since the end of the 90s. But there is now a new meaning of the word [FOREIGN], it became so widely used to describe those tycoons who were robbing the country of its resources. But eventually it came, and robbing the country of its resources and accumulating such an amount of money that they could influence the policies of the state and actually do what they want, and corrupt the officials. Eventually this word [FOREIGN] became to mean just any very wealthy person, any rich person. In a way this change of meaning is quite symptomatic. [MUSIC]
