Introduction

Introduction

Jerry Eades

These papers originated from the Sociology Summer School for Soviet Sociologists which was held at the University of Kent, Canterbury, between July and September 1990. It should be emphasised at the outset that they are very much working papers, reporting on research in progress. Some of them are based on research which was already under way the Soviet Union, while others are based on the analysis of data sets acquired in the UK. Most of them are also agendas for future research.

Thus the title of this volume. Most of the papers are `transitional' in two senses. First, they reflect the state which a number of ongoing research projects had reached at a particular point in time. This research will continue, and much of the material will no doubt be reworked for publication in a more conventional form elsewhere. Second, most of the papers deal, either directly or indirectly, with the current state of the Soviet Union itself, which, whatever the eventual direction of change, is certainly a society in transition. Thus, the decision to make the papers available in their present form was taken for two reasons. On the one hand, we wanted to make available more widely a record of the work of the 1990 Summer School itself, and to convey some of the intellectual excitement it created for all who participated in it, Soviet and non-Soviet alike. On the other hand, given the furious pace of events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, we considered that it might be of interest to see how the rising generation of Soviet social scientists were reacting to them, seeing that they bear a heavy responsibility for shaping and interpreting events in the future.

The Soviet Sociology Summer Schools

The idea for the Summer Schools originated with a proposal from Professor Teodor Shanin to the British Academy in 1987.1 He saw that one implication of perestroika in the Soviet Union was that the social sciences themselves would have to be reconstructed in order to provide an intellectual basis for formulating policies and monitoring the impact of reforms taking place in other areas of Soviet life. In particular, sociology was in a very poor state, having been banned from the 1930s to the 1950s and repressed in the 1970s and 1980s, during the `period of stagnation'.2 As a result, during a period in which basic social science information was vital, Soviet sociologists saw themselves as out of touch with developments both in theory and methodology. Thus the aim of the Summer Schools was to take some of the most promising Soviet sociologists of the younger generation, and give them intensive exposure to the latest issues and developments in western sociology during a three months' stay in the United Kingdom. During this period they were to attend lectures and seminars given by leading figures in the various branches of the subject; work on their own projects and develop research contacts with western scholars working in related areas; and develop their language skills. The proposal received the enthusiastic support of senior Soviet scholars, notably Academician Tatyana Zaslavskaya, the President of the Soviet Sociological Association,3 and the first School, directed by Professor Shanin, was held in Manchester in the Summer of 1989. The second School was held at the University of Kent in the summer of 1990 under the direction of Professor Ray Pahl.4 Twenty-one Soviet sociologists took part, all in their twenties, and in addition to the language, cultural and academic programmes, each worked on their own research projects in collaboration with a British academic adviser.5 In the last week of the School, a series of seminars were held in which the participants presented the results of their research. By this time, many of them had already completed substantial written drafts using the Kent computing system. It was clear that these not only represented a rich record of the work of the School, but that they provided an unusual insight into the kinds of substantive, theoretical and methodological issues with which younger Soviet sociologists are currently engaged. The Management Committee agreed that these drafts should be edited for publication, and the ESRC very generously agreed to cover the costs of editing, and printing. As I had helping the participants with their word processing, I agreed to take on the editing. Fortunately, Caroline Schwaller, the Summer School administrator, was able to spend a month in Moscow where she collected revised versions of many of the papers, and was able to sort out many of the editing problems directly with the Soviet participants. The final editing and camera-ready copy production was undertaken by the two of us at the University of Kent after her return.

One problem which inevitably arose was that of how far we should alter the language of the originals. The standard of written English naturally varied, and so we have made the obvious grammatical corrections where necessary. However, the participants developed their own styles of writing during the summer, and these, while unconventional by the standards of western sociology journals, are often extremely forceful and effective as means of expression. We have retained the original language as far as possible to give a flavour of this, and we hope that those who took part in the School will still recognise in these papers the voices of their authors.

The themes of the papers

The participants in the Summer School all selected the topics for their own projects, but there are, despite this element of randomness, a number of common themes running through them. The largest group deals with various aspects of the political economy of the Soviet Union during the period of perestroika . Radaev's paper discusses social stratification in the Soviet system, concentrating on the situation prior to 1985. He argues that classes in the classic sense were eliminated from the Soviet Union during and soon after the revolution, to be replaced by a new stratification system based on power and privilege. He discusses at length the principles on which power was allocated and the strata to which this gave rise, together with the relationships of bargaining and exchange which grew up between them. By these means, not only the nomenklatura , but also subordinate strata, were able to gain access to resources, and therefore had a stake in perpetuating the system. As a result of the restructuring process, the alliances between strata have been broken, along with confidence in the institutions of government, and the result is a fluid situation in which various groups struggle to establish new alliances and ways of regaining access to resources.

This analysis points to the fundamental contradiction within the restructuring process in the USSR. On the one hand it threatens the power of the nomenklatura and others with a stake in the system, and on the other it is not going fast enough for the emerging entrepreneurs and cooperatives, in both the official and `second' economies, to generate the economic growth on which a solution of the crisis ultimately depends. The papers by Moskalenko and Siderenko both touch on aspects of this contradiction. Moskalenko suggests that one of the major constraints on the development of cooperatives is the degree of control and interference by officials: in fact, Soviet businessmen seem to be more worried about officials than they are about racketeers. Siderenko argues that with the crisis in the state distributive system, the legitimacy of the state itself is under threat. Many of those who profited from the old arrangements, including unskilled workers, bureaucrats, and those on collective farms, are now disenchanted, while the skilled workers and the intelligentsia are pressing for radical reforms from which they feel they would benefit.

In this fluid situation, the emergence of new political groupings is dealt with in the papers by Mamay and Nazarov. Mamay takes up the theme of social movements, and considers how they have been dealt with in the literature to date. Rather than taking Marxism as his starting point, he looks instead at the treatment of these movements in western social science, from Smelser to Touraine and Castells. He concludes that all these approaches have something to offer, but that insights from different approaches have to be combined if the movements are to be fully explained. Applying these theories to the current situation in the Soviet Union, like Radaev he notes the the isolation of the nomenklatura and the willingness of groups of people to defend their material interests. In the present fluid situation, numerous social movements have flourished, mobilising around a variety of national, religious and subcultural, in addition to economic, issues. Nazarov is also concerned with political mobilisation, but from a rather different standpoint. Given the fluidity of soviet social organisation and public opinion, he applies cluster analysis to his survey data to see whether or not discrete patterns of response are emerging, and he concludes that they are. He describes a range of political types, ranging from radical reformers to more conservative groups, still advocating reform, but within a recognisably `socialist' framework. If he is correct, this is yet more evidence of the political polarisation of different interest groups in Soviet society. Koshechkina and Galin both explore British data on social attitudes in order to develop tools for their own research in the Soviet Union. Koshechkina is concerned with the important issue of tolerance, and the kinds of attitudes which are related to it. The British data suggest the existence of three clusters of respondents, varying with age and sex, and ranging from a group intolerant of most things (except racism) to those who are much more tolerant on most issues. Galin is similarly concerned with different `images of society' in different social strata, and finds systematic differences within these strata in attitudes towards the state. Discussion of tolerance and world views leads into that of the other major social and political problem in the Soviet Union at the present time, the relationships between the various minorities and nationalities of which it is composed. Three participants dealt with this problem, Galkina, Makarova and Shakinian, but unfortunately only Galkina's paper was available at the time of going to press. In their presentations, Makarova and Shakinian dealt respectively with ethnicity in central Asian cities and Armenian nationalism. Armenia is a particularly interesting example of a region in which there are a number of competing versions of recent history (Turkish, Soviet, Armenian, Western etc.) and the current political conflicts tend only to reinforce existing stereotypes and myths. (Political myths were also dealt with by Khapayeva in her presentation which used data on Soviet citizen's perceptions of historical figures and events.) Galkina, who plans to do research on mixed marriages and identities against a background of increasing ethnic polarisation, is rightly sceptical about broad general theories of ethnicity and ethnic mobilisation. She takes the view that ethnicity is situational, depending on the specificity of local, as well as macro-level, factors, and in her paper she is concerned with mapping out a general framework for research into the origins and significance of ethnic identity. These papers raise the general issues of socialisation and the ability of the Soviet system to reproduce itself, and these are dealt with in the four papers by Ledeneva, Klimova, Dlutsky and Yerofeyev. Ledeneva is concerned with the role of education in the transmission of official ideology, while Klimova discusses socialisation and the relations between the generations. She raises a number of important questions about the effects of a period of radical political change on the socialisation process, as well as on the relationships between the younger generation and their parents. Like Ledeneva, Dlutsky is concerned with political socialisation, and, in particular, with the role of television. The nature of this process is extremely problematic given that a new set of political beliefs is being worked out in public life, and this promises to be a fruitful area of future research. Finally, in the most extensive of these papers, Yerofeyev considers the the rise of Soviet youth subcultures and the significance of rock music. Once reviled and repressed by the authorities, and still frowned upon in some circles, rock music is now a flourishing industry throughout the country, and Yerofeyev draws on a wide range of contemporary theory in order to analyse the significance of this phenomenon. His starting point is a critique of the theory of `mass culture'. He concludes that the distinction between `high' and `low' culture is invalid, that rock is an authentic means of artistic expression, and that the explosion of interest in rock music in the Soviet Union since 1985 is resulting in the emergence of a variety of subcultures with a range of political orientations. Theoretical adventurousness is also a feature of the two final papers. Volkov applies the ideas of Foucault to the study of revolution, and discusses Marxism not as an explanation of revolutions, but as part of the reality of revolutions. This leads him to examine not the economic, political and psychological conditions for revolution, but rather their discursive practices, and he goes on to consider the structure of the `Revolutionary Text' and the politics of discourse. Thus, he brings contemporary theory to bear on the relationship between text, myth and politics, the theme of many of the earlier papers. Contemporary theory is also the subject of the final paper, Kharkhordin's witty and informed survey of postmodernism. Despite the fact that this paper has the least obvious direct relationship to the situation in Eastern Europe, connections nevertheless abound. As a process, the decline of modernism as a consensus ideology has much in common with the decline of Marxism, while the fragmentation of class identities is a theme that permeates many of the other papers in this collection. With the decline of the dominant paradigm in Soviet sociology, the search is on for new models to describe the new social situation, and the chances are that theoretical and methodological pluralism and electicism will become the norm. What the best papers in this collection look forward to, therefore, is a period in which Soviet sociologists will not only continue to develop the sociological study of the Soviet Union, but will increasingly contribute to the theoretical and methodological development of the subject internationally.

Notes