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.
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.
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.
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