Russian sociology: the second coming of August Comte

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  April, 1994  by David J. Gray

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Introduction

IN OCTOBER 1991, I flew to Novosibirsk, Siberia to teach a compressed course on sociological theory at Novosibirsk State University in Russia. This was the first course in sociology, taught by a Western academic, offered by this university for credit. Perhaps my class of thirty-five students and fifteen faculty members in sociology and related disciplines learned something about ideas previously "forbidden." More certain is that, through them, I became acquainted with the state of contemporary Russian sociology.

C. Wright Mills was correct in emphasizing the essential sociological relationship of history, social structure and biography.(1) It is worth adding that, as we attempt to understand daily life, the relationship typically is reversed. One encounters Russians currently engaged in sociological endeavors individually, and their orientations and motivations are understood in the context of their Soviet ideological and structural heritage. There is unevenness in this history, of course. But, for seven decades a communist totalitarian regime consistently had proclaimed that Karl Marx had provided all that one would, or should, conceptually need. The limitation of this official pretense was known and felt by intellectuals within the former Soviet Union for some time. Sakharov in physics and Solzhenitsyn in literature represent outstanding examples, well known, in the West. But, for the discipline of sociology, totalitarianism is and was especially limiting, since the very best sociology analyzes cultural values and social structures and the relevance of both in individual lives. Thus, the long-term problem for those who had sociological interests during Soviet times can be stated succinctly. The central aim of sociology to develop an understanding of the nature of social life conflicted directly with the Marxist proclamation that the historical laws determining social life already were well understood.

This official Soviet position was initiated not at the time of the 1917 revolution, but by Stalin. Before the Communist Revolution, and during its first decade, sociological research was conducted on a relatively large scale.(2) Studies in "areas as diverse as labor management relations, rural sociology, marriage and the family, prostitution and suicide" continued into the 1920s "during the NEP (New Economic Policy) era."(3) After Stalin secured complete power in the late twenties and throughout his quarter century role, however, the word "sociology" was seldom mentioned and, when it was, mainly to dismiss it as bourgeois "pseudoscience."(4) Only after Kruschchev's denunciation of Stalin, following Stalin's death three years earlier, at the Meeting of the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, did sociology re-emerge as an academic discipline under the protective wing of economics.(5)

II

The Re-emergence of Sociology

INITIALLY PROMISING UTILITY "without posing any political or ideological threat," sociological studies of "labor turnover, attitudes to occupations, occupational choices of school-children, and education for employment"(6) were conducted during a seven year "embryonic period (1958-1965)."(7) As political liberalization under Krushchev allowed investigation of "politically sensitive topics," such as "the study of public opinion on current issues,"(8) the "Golden Years of Soviet Sociology, 1965-1972"(9) developed. This era of relative freedom was followed by a decade of stagnation under the more conservative rule of Brezhnev that was ended by his death in 1982. Yet, the heritage of the Krushchev "golden years" is now honored by mature Russian academics in post-Gorbachev times as they occasionally refer to themselves as "the children of the Twentieth Party Congress."

One of them, now in her mid-sixties, Tatiana Zaslavskaia is the "undisputed leader of the 'new sociology'."(10) A graduate in economics from Moscow State University who initially had studied physics, Zaslavskaia, in 1963, joined Abel Aganbegyan, an economist, and then head of the Institute of Economics and Industrial Engineering, at Akademgorodok. Akademgorodok, ("the Academic City") is a complex of twenty two largely scientific and technical institutes surrounding Novosibirsk State University. It was deliberately created and located over two thousand miles east of Moscow during Krushchev's regime to ensure some measure of scientific and intellectual freedom from party and ideological control. In Akademgorodok, Zaslavskaia and sociology found a home. "A group of nearly fifty sociologists" largely engaged in economically oriented sociology "eventually took refuge under Zaslavskaia's umbrella."(11) Theoretically, sociology had to be conducted within a Marxian perspective. Nonetheless, the recent appraisal of one informed Western observer of Soviet sociology is that Zaslavskaia's "workshop in Novosibirsk has had a record of high quality work since the 1960s."(12)

How this was possible under the surveillance of varying but always totalitarian regimes is best known by Zaslavskaia. Her mixture of political courage and intellect, however, became known to the world in 1983 when The Washington Post disclosed the existence and main contents of the now famous Novosibirsk Report. This document, "the bravest text ever written by a Soviet scholar for official use,"(13) was authored primarily by Zaslavskaia in cooperation with Aganbegyan. In it, she called attention to the misfortunes of a centralized command economy and the consequent "laziness, incompetence, and apathy of masses of workers who were alienated from their jobs by a system that offered them no personal stake in, or connection with, the enterprises where they worked."(14) And Zaslavskaia proposed a broad solution. To alleviate this general condition of worker alienation, "Serious reorganization of economic management" was required "accompanied by a certain redistribution of rights and responsibilities among various groups of workers."(15) Needed was decentralization of economic authority and, two years before Gorbachev, Zaslavskaia "was among the first people, if not the very first one, actually to use the term perestroika,"(16) which she regarded as a pre-condition for loosening a centralized command economy in need of organizational reform. With Gorbachev's rise to power, Zaslavskaia moved to Moscow to become one of his close advisers. Following his fall, in a Yeltsin era, she has remained in Moscow as the director of the Center for Public Opinion that was created in response to her proposal that detail the need for social data as Russia attempted to become more democratic.