SOCIO-ECONOMIC DIFFERENTIATION OF THE POST-SOVIET VILLAGE: SOCIOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE FACTORS OF RURAL TRANSFORMATION

The social and economic differentiation in the countryside is a classic issue of agrarian sociology; however, in the post-Soviet period it was considered not only by rural sociologists, but also by agrarian economists and geographers. The object of the research is dual in nature: on the one hand, it is a number of rural regions in which the processes of social and economic differentiation were studied; on the other hand, it is a number of rural communities and rural households which undergo such processes in varying degrees. The study aims at identification of the main types of social-economic differentiation in the countryside and at describing its dynamics in different social groups of the Russian countryside. To achieve this goal, the authors consider social transformation processes in the main rural strata of the post-Soviet period, compare processes of social and economic differentiation in rural areas in various countries, and take into account gender and generational characteristics of different forms of rural differentiation