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After 1989, class appeared to be everywhere and nowhere. The messy consequences of the emergence of new classes and new types of economic inequalities were plain for all to see, but no one uttered the term "class." The concept appeared illegitimate because of associations with the old regime, even though it always had more success explaining developments in the capitalist world east Europe was entering than the state socialist world it was leaving. The media and academy adopted a discourse of "normality" instead: New rules resulted not from policy choices empowering certain groups at the expense of others but from necessity, and people just had to adapt. Because the economic collapse nevertheless elicited much anger and frustration, the absence of class talk contributed to a proliferation of nationalist talk, and thus had political consequences. The paper rehearses reasons for the decline of class analysis in the region, and notes the post-1989 fascination with the "middle class." It explores the evolution of class analysis during the communist period, culminating in the embrace of a stratification theory that resisted discussion of power, which made sense at the time but became a burden after 1989. Several critical class analyses of state socialism, from the 1930s to today, are then introduced, demonstrating both their relevance and their unfortunate absence from debates. New types of class analyses promoted by younger scholars and activists are emerging, however, and are discussed in the summaries of the other essays in this collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Class analysis has never gone out of fashion in Ukraine, but it has been conducted in ways that limit its effectiveness and ability to make sense of the world. It is marked by four aspects inherited from Soviet times: a focus on large-scale surveys offering only surface presentations of findings, a gradational rather than relational orientation to class, unwillingness to engage with subjective experiences of class, and a tendency towards functional legitimation of the existing order. Data showing significant transformation of social structure and high levels of inequality tend to be presented with little consideration of its meaning for people's lives. The absence of serious theoretical reflection, deep ethnographic analysis, or studies of class relations and power constitute significant handicaps for Ukrainian sociology. A recently created group of young sociologists gathered around the journal and website Commons/Spilne has been seeking to overcome these limitations. Embracing "public sociology's" aim of producing reflexive knowledge for academic and non-academic audiences alike, this new milieu, with its creators trained in western universities and engaged with Marxist social science and left-wing politics, has explored topics such as changing relations in work, the informal economy, independent unions, labor mobilization, and ethnographic study of workers' life-worlds. Pressing work still needs to be done on the oligarchical business class, middle-class activists, class politics across regions, and the Maidan events of 2014 and the conflicts and violence that have followed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Class became virtually a taboo topic in Poland after the fall of the communist system, and a discourse of "normality" took hold. Social scientists and journalists considered new market institutions natural and inescapable and urged people to adapt. Sociologists were more interested in the identity of the new elites than the social consequences of the new capitalism, and a cult of a not-yet-existing "middle class" quickly grew. Inequality and poverty, previously understood as systemic, were now presented as due to individual pathology. That class talk became so marginalized despite the historical robustness of Polish sociology as a discipline is explained by the dominance of a functionalist stratification paradigm, which kept questions relevant to the new system, about emerging class relations and power, from even being raised. Polish sociology thus appeared stuck in the past and in the future--thinking about stratification without power, and imagining an individualist meritocracy as already in effect--but not ready to ask about the class formation and new economic relations of the present. The paucity of class analysis allowed illiberal populist nationalism to grow, blaming economic problems on internal "anti-Polish" enemies. New kinds of class thinking has revived in the new millennium, promoted by a new generation raised in a capitalist society and trained in western universities, and legitimized in part by class analyses of postcommunism by scholars from abroad. Though hobbled, class analysis is making a modest comeback. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In postcommunist Estonia, the topic of inequality was considered "embarrassing." The dominant popular assumption was that inequalities just happen naturally. Class and inequality discourse was effectively marginalized due to long-lasting success in focusing attention on nationalizing issues. A "transition culture" that lionized the capitalist future has also contributed to the marginalization of class discourse. Because of this marginalization, and the power of national/ethnic discourse and transitional culture, those most economically vulnerable were deprived of the cultural and discursive resources to resist the most extreme market-oriented policies. Sociologists did discuss inequality more seriously, but mostly according to a gradational and functional stratification paradigm: the central focus has been on individual attributes that divide people into classes. The analysis focusing on relations of exploitation and domination have been virtually absent in postcommunist Estonia. We conclude that the main challenge for Estonian social science is to incorporate concepts of power, exploitation, and domination perspective into study of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article follows changes in the paradigms and institutional context of Hungarian sociology of social structure, as formed by Hungary's double dependence on Soviet and Western cores throughout the second part of the twentieth century. It demonstrates that as a result of those changes, the concept of class has been absent from the sociology of social structure from the early 1970s on. Thinking towards a possible reconstruction of twentieth-century Hungarian social formation in a class-sensitive perspective embedded in the dynamics of the capitalist world system, we point at a typical effect of global hierarchies on the description of local social structure: the tendency to identify a "double structure" in local society. This gesture places various characteristics of local society on two different ontological levels--for example, Western versus Eastern, future versus past. We argue that in order to conceive of local social formation as part of an integrated global history, this internalized effect of global hierarchies needs to be transcended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses the use of class in Czech sociology. Czech social stratification research has used the concept of class as part of its standard vocabulary. The approach to class was distinctively shaped by postcommunist legacies. As an analytical concept, socio-economic status was preferred over class, particularly in the 1990s. The middle class played a prominent role as a subject of research and also a rallying cry. An important legacy that shaped the approach was the intellectual formation of Czech sociologists through the critique of the social stratification system in state socialism. This specific form of anticommunism shaped the type of questions typically asked in the stratification research and its subject matter. Moreover, the anticommunist legacy shaped interpretations of the broader implications of the stratification mechanisms and class effects, giving rise to an overly functionalist approach to the class system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]