Education and start in life as determinants of social mobility

The author studies one of the urgent problems in Russian sociology-namely, the factors and channels of social mobility in the transforming Russian society; the regional specific character of their functioning. The study is innovative in giving a comparative analysis of significance of social circulation channels in Soviet and Post-Soviet periods of Russian society development (the Army, school, family, occupational groups, economics, politics etc.). The selective role of education as well as the role of a successful start in life have been focused upon separately. For the first time in a research work the materials of historical narrations of family dynasties of students of a number of Tatarstan higher educational institutions have been introduced, which represents an approbation of the qualitative method in a sociological research work.