Though the collapse of the Soviet Union is often treated as a sharp institutional rupture, this presentation suggests that in the Russian armed forces, at least, social hierarchies outlived the empire that produced them. Drawing on a leaked dataset of approximately 120,000 Russian service members, the presentation examines patterns of promotion and rank distribution across ethnic groups. The results reveal systematic “ethnic stacking”: Eastern Slavs are disproportionately concentrated in officer positions, while many non–Eastern Slavic minorities remain clustered in enlisted ranks. Rather than treating this as a contemporary anomaly, the talk situates these patterns in a longer imperial genealogy. Tsarist and Soviet manpower policies organized military labor through widely recognized ethnic status hierarchies, differentiating between “core” peoples and peripheral subjects in assessments of loyalty, reliability, and political trust. The analysis shows that these hierarchies did not disappear in 1991. The officer corps that had managed Soviet military operations across the empire remained largely in place, carrying with them informal assumptions that continued to shape recruitment, evaluation, and promotion in the post-Soviet armed forces. The talk concludes by discussing how these enduring personnel patterns help illuminate who bears the social costs of Russia’s current war in Ukraine.
Maria Lipman is serving as the Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor in International Studies in winter 2026. Lipman is a political analyst and commentator whose work focuses on state‑society relations, media, and the politics of history in Russia. Her recent publications in Foreign Affairs include co‑authored articles such as “The Limits of Putin’s Balancing Act: What the Kremlin Will Sacrifice in Pursuit of Victory in Ukraine” and “Forever Putinism: The Russian Autocrat’s Answer to the Problem of Succession.” Lipman has served as editor or deputy editor of various Russian‑ and English‑language publications over the past three decades. From 2003 to 2014, she was an associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center, where she edited the journal Pro et Contra.
Jesse Driscoll is a Professor of Political Science and the Faculty Chair of the Global Leadership Institute at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California San Diego. He is the author of numerous articles and three books: Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States (Cambridge, 2015), Doing Global Fieldwork (Columbia, 2021) and Ukraine’s Unnamed War: Before The Russian Invasion of 2022 (Cambridge, 2023).
Jeff Eden
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