Abstract
This essay examines the role played by Soviet sociology in the USSR’s transition to capitalism. It analyzes the discipline’s contribution to the critique of Soviet socio-economic life during the 1980s, identifying the emergence of two divergent viewpoints within Soviet sociology over the relationship between inequality, the market, and the goals of a socialist society. The essay explores how these viewpoints intersected with the implementation of economic reforms by the Gorbachev regime, arguing that the dominant forces within Soviet sociology ultimately helped the party-state bureaucracy craft the legitimizing ideology of perestroika by insisting that growing social inequality and market-based mechanisms of distribution were the very embodiment of socialism. After enduring a politically fraught and semi-pariah existence for much of its history, Soviet sociology enjoyed a belle epoque as it helped the ruling elite navigate the transition to capitalism.
Introduction
In the spring of 1985 at a plenum of the Central Committee, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union endorsed a program of economic reforms known as perestroika (restructuring) under the leadership of its newly appointed general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev. Over the course of the next six years, this reform program would unleash a series of socio-economic and political convulsions that pushed Soviet society into a deep crisis, ultimately culminating in the liquidation of the USSR, the wholesale privatization of state-owned property, and a sharp decline in the living standards of the majority of the population. At precisely the same time, Soviet sociology was entering its heyday, experiencing a level of institutional recognition and political influence that it had never before achieved over the course of its entire post-war history.
During the 1980s Soviet sociology was deeply involved in the entire perestroika project. In 1999, Gennadii Osipov, one of the USSR’s leading sociologists, summed up the depth of the relationship between the discipline and the politico-economic transformations of that era when he observed, ‘If sociology had not been reborn in the 1960s thanks to our efforts, the reformation 1 would not have occurred. In other words, sociology – and I do not say this lightly – stood at the headwaters of perestroika’ (Osipov, 1999).
This essay examines the role played by Soviet sociology in the reform agenda implemented by Gorbachev. It analyzes the discipline’s contribution to the critique of Soviet socio-economic life during the 1980s, identifying the emergence of two divergent viewpoints within Soviet sociology over the relationship between inequality, the market, and the goals of a socialist society. The dominant forces within the discipline increasingly promoted the position that rising levels of social stratification and market-based mechanisms of distribution were the very embodiment of socialism. A small minority opposed this conception, insisting that egalitarianism was the essence of the socialist project. A conflict ensued. The pro-stratification/pro-market argument advanced by Soviet sociologists formed part of the legitimizing ideology of perestroika, and was intended to help the Gorbachev regime push back against growing popular discontent over the impact of his reforms. After enduring a politically fraught and semi-pariah existence for much of its history, Soviet sociology enjoyed a belle epoque as it helped the ruling elite to navigate the transition to capitalism. Ironically, those who led this process firmly believed they were fighting against the party-state bureaucracy.
In documenting the role played by Soviet sociology in the transformations of the 1980s, this paper seeks to address a dimension of the discipline’s history that has received relatively little attention in the English-language literature (as well as the Russian). While the work of Soviet sociologists generated interest in the West during the Cold War (Hahn, 1977; Vucinich, 1974; Yanowitch, 1973, 1977), once the USSR collapsed retrospective analyses of the discipline largely came to a halt. Furthermore, the few works that traced Soviet sociology’s fate through the early 1990s still tended to concentrate their attention on earlier periods (see for example Greenfield, 1991; Weinberg, 2004). This gap in the literature is notable not just because Soviet sociology gained such prominence in the final years of the country’s existence, but also because the history of the discipline during that era yields insights into the social forces behind perestroika and the broader issues at stake in the Communist Party’s reform efforts.
In the aftermath of the USSR’s collapse 20 years ago, a significant literature emerged exploring the socio-political dimensions of the transition to capitalism in this region and East Europe. Many scholars noted the continuity, in one form or another, between the Soviet and post-Soviet elite (Eyal and Townsley, 1995; Hanley et al., 1995; Rona-Tas, 1994). More recently, as part of a symposium sponsored by Critical Sociology, other scholars have once again challenged the very concept of a ‘transition’ to capitalism in the USSR; the thesis of state capitalism posits that the Soviet Union had operated on fundamentally capitalist foundations for much, if not all, of its existence (Gabriel et al., 2008; Haynes, 2008). According to this perspective, Gorbachev’s reforms and the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991 represented not so much a break with the Soviet Union’s socialist past, as a further evolution of an already established, capitalist socio-economic system. In addition, other contributors to this journal have also called into question the supposedly socialist character of the Soviet Union by disputing the idea that the USSR ‘represented a social experiment emanating from Marx’s thought’ (Paolucci, 2004: 617).
The role played by Soviet sociology in the perestroika era has significance for these literatures in different ways. The ability of key sections of the former Soviet elite to transform themselves into the new Russian ruling class is particularly remarkable when consideration is given to the fact that the majority of Soviet citizens experienced a dramatic decline in their living standards as this was occurring (Gerber and Hout, 1998). The reality of elite continuity in the former Soviet Union raises the question of how the party-state bureaucracy was able to successfully navigate this transition, in the face of the immiseration of the general population. The question is made all the more complex when one takes into consideration the fact that the introduction of market-based reforms by the Gorbachev administration was carried out in the name of bringing more justice to the population. How, then, did the ruling elite lay the ideological groundwork for the transition to capitalism? What stumbling blocks did it confront in the process? What social forces helped it overcome these challenges? Examining the role played by Soviet sociology in the events of the 1980s provides insights into these questions.
The history of the discipline during that era also speaks to issues raised by those arguing the thesis of state capitalism. The role Soviet sociology played in the events of the 1980s reveals that a pro-market outlook existed within layers of the intelligentsia working in alliance with the Communist Party. Soviet society was hardly some sort of unadulterated, anti-capitalist bulwark with a state-sponsored ideology rooted in classical Marxism. At the same time, however, the dispute that erupted within Soviet sociology over the relationship between inequality, the market, and the goals of a socialist society – and the popular interest it generated – demonstrates that pro-capitalist sentiment was not the only ideological impulse to be found within Soviet society. Egalitarian and socialist-minded views were also pervasive, with objective roots in the historical and socio-economic foundations of Soviet life. As the country’s ruling elite set about dismantling the nationalized property forms upon which the USSR rested, it came into head-on conflict with these conceptions, as well as the history and social forces they represented. The character and intensity of the attack on egalitarianism indicate that Gorbachev’s measures represented not so much a further evolution within an existing (state) capitalist system, as a break with the last remaining vestiges of centrally planned economy in the USSR.
Historical Background
Soviet sociology had a unique social and intellectual history. The very nature of the discipline as the science of society meant that it was deeply affected by the country’s turbulent political and social history. Each era through which sociology passed – the Stalin period (the 1930s to the early 1950s), Khrushchev’s ‘Thaw’ (the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s), and the Brezhnev ‘stagnation’ (the late 1960s to the early 1980s) – shaped in some way the role the discipline would come to play during Gorbachev’s perestroika. The relationship between sociology and the Communist Party was also significant in this regard.
The Stalin Era and the Suppression of Soviet Sociology
In the 1930s, Stalin labeled sociology a ‘bourgeois science’ and shut down all the country’s sociology departments. This coincided with the purging of statisticians in state agencies and the widespread falsification of government data (Vaughan, 1986). The party-state bureaucracy was hostile to any investigation of Soviet socio-economic development and social-class relations, particularly given the disastrous consequences of its collectivization campaign on the countryside (Novikova, 1996) and its efforts to pin responsibility for deteriorating conditions on ‘Trotskyite wreckers’. Furthermore, sociological data on social inequality ‘embarrassed the leadership by stressing the gap between the highly differentiated system of rewards and the professed ideal of the Party’ (Vaughan, 1986: 157). Many of those involved in the sociological research and theoretical debates of the 1920s ended up victims of state repression.
Stalin’s purges had a lasting and damaging impact on all spheres of Soviet social thought. The elimination of an entire generation of Marxist intellectuals during the 1930s meant that post-war Soviet sociology found itself with only a very limited Marxist intellectual heritage from which to draw, apart from the official diktats of ‘Marxism-Leninism’. In addition to losing access to an extensive array of theoretical literature, scholars who entered the (rehabilitated) discipline in the 1960s and thereafter never regained complete access to the political material produced during the 1920s about the social structure of the Soviet Union.
The Post-Stalin Era and Soviet Sociology’s Theoretical Crisis
The repression of Soviet sociology continued for more than two decades. The discipline was only officially rehabilitated in 1957 during the period known as the ‘Thaw’, when under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev the state initiated a process of partial de-Stalinization. The primary impetus for sociology’s rehabilitation was the government’s need for information about socio-economic conditions in the country (Firsov, 2001; Yanowitch, 1977). The Khrushchev regime, which had promised the Soviet masses that they would be living in a fully ‘communist’ society by the 1980s, undertook significant investments in infrastructure, heavy industry, and other sectors of the economy. In order to develop the policies that would drive this transformation, the state needed data about a whole host of issues, including labor motivation, workplace conditions, family relations, educational trends, social mobility, and so on (Hahn, 1977; Yanowitch, 1977). As a consequence, the discipline was reborn with an overwhelmingly empirical focus, oriented to the study of social problems with the use of ‘middle-range’ theories that would not cut across official ideology about the character of Soviet life (Hahn, 1977).
The origin of post-war Soviet sociology in Khrushchev’s Thaw is also important for understanding the political outlook that animated the discipline over the course of its subsequent history. During the Thaw, ‘intellectuals were mobilized to fight for the new humanist and non-Stalinist version of communism’ (Boobbyer, 2005: 63). Sociology attracted to its ranks young researchers who wanted to contribute to improving the Soviet system from within. Those scholars that formed the founding generation of the discipline conceived of sociology as a means to promote the democratization of everyday life.
In their opinion, sociological investigations would expose the real moods and opinions of the people and in this sense, surpass the authorities, who frequently continued to arrogantly insist on their own knowledge of the demands of the population, maintaining that their policies reflected the genuine interests of the Soviet people. (Firsov, 2001: 85)
The discipline’s empiricism was, in this context, progressive, reformist, and critical of the existing order, but not anti-Soviet.
At the same time, the Soviet sociology born out of the Khrushchev Thaw had relatively shallow intellectual foundations in a historical sense. The repression of sociology during Stalin’s rule meant that there were no scholars trained in the discipline when it was rehabilitated in the mid-1950s. During the post-war period, the individuals who staffed the USSR’s various sociology institutes and laboratories came from other fields, in particular philosophy, economics, and history. While there were notable exceptions to this, overall, scholars made little effort to root the discipline in its pre-Stalin, Soviet past. As one sociologist at the Institute of Sociology in Moscow noted during our 2006 interview, ‘When they (i.e. the Thaw generation) began (to work on sociology again in the 1960s) they did not base it on anything. They started their own sociology’ (interview with A. Krivoruchka, Moscow). 2
The emasculation of Soviet Marxism by Stalin’s purges, the empirical focus with which Soviet sociology was reborn, and the absence of an established intellectual heritage from which sociologists could draw had real consequences for scholars. In particular, the discipline existed in a perpetual theoretical crisis. Officially speaking, Marxism–Leninism was the framework guiding Soviet sociologists. However, the average brand of state-sanctioned ‘historical materialism’ and ‘scientific communism’ peddled by the regime’s intellectual gatekeepers offered scholars little to work with. In an expression of the hostility they felt towards this ideology, many sociologists eschewed theoretical thinking altogether. One scholar who wrote on questions of labor and stratification during the Soviet era told me in 2007, ‘Why do you think it is necessary to read (theory)? A person can formulate everything themselves … Theory isn’t the only thing that influences a person. Reality influences them’ (interview with N. Rimashevskaia, Moscow).
Even as a section of the discipline adopted an anti-theoretical attitude, others explored alternatives to official doctrine. Access to contemporary, Western sociological literature was highly limited, particularly during the Brezhnev era. As one scholar noted, the discipline developed in the face of the general absence of books (Firsov, 2001). In addition, exposure to Western sociology varied significantly across institutions, sub-fields, and rank. However, through the work of those engaged in critiquing ‘bourgeois sociology’, non-Marxist theory filtered into the discipline more broadly (Novikov, 1982). Contact with scholars from eastern Europe was another means by which Soviet sociologists were exposed to ideas from the West. 3 A survey of Soviet sociological work will turn up, for example, a range of different influences, including everything from Marxian conceptions to Western organizational management theory to Parsonian structural functionalism. The latter, in particular, was widely embraced by scholars (Vucinich, 1974). During my discussions with Soviet-era sociologists, many mentioned the importance of Parsons to their work.
The use of Parsons’s theories by Soviet sociologists is a lengthy topic. He was popularized in the discipline during the late 1960s and 1970s, when the Brezhnev-era ‘stagnation’ set in. At the most general level, sociologists believed the structural-functional approach provided the methods with which to analyze the interacting components of the Soviet social organism. ‘Sociology is a science about the mechanisms of stabilization’, observed one Soviet sociologist, and structural-functionalism promised to help scholars uncover those mechanisms (Pugacheva, 1994: 168). Parsons’s ideas were drawn on to justify sociological investigations into what was wrong with the functioning of Soviet society and how it could be fixed, while at the same time sidestepping the Marxian question of the existence of hostile social interests. According to official doctrine, these did not exist in the USSR.
However, because Marxism was supposed to be the discipline’s only paradigm, there could never be a forthright discussion about which elements of Marxist theory scholars were rejecting or attempting to merge with other, often anti-Marxist, philosophies. Parsons’s anti-communism, for example, was overlooked. Regardless of how one might ultimately characterize the theoretical outlook(s) that shaped the discipline (a worthy topic for future consideration), one can say that a theoretically consistent, classical Marxism was not its fundamental underpinning.
The effects of the theoretical confusion that existed in Soviet sociology were compounded by the fact that scholars could never fully tackle one of the central issues of sociological thought – the question of social structure. Although scholars wrote extensively on the conditions of the working class, peasantry, and intelligentsia, the ruling elite was out of bounds as an object of intensive and open investigation, much less theoretical consideration. This was more or less true across all periods of post-war Soviet sociology. Scholars were aware of the existence of the party-state bureaucracy and, at times, tried to come up with methods to account for its existence in their analytical models (Zaslavsky, 1977). But all such efforts were inevitably cut short for political reasons. In consequence, sociological conceptions about the socio-economic structure of Soviet society, the socio-political interests of the ruling elite, the general character of social relations in the USSR, and the overall dynamic of social change were necessarily underdeveloped and/or lopsided.
Soviet Sociology, the Communist Party, and Soviet Dissidence
Over the course of the post-war period, the state’s attitude toward the discipline varied depending upon a host of political and institutional factors. The Communist Party effectively granted Soviet sociology the status of a semi-officially-sanctioned internal critic of the regime (albeit one that was often ignored and subject to regular chastisement). As Andrei Zdravomislov explained in our 2007 interview in Moscow: Sociology in the Soviet Union was only possible with the support of the state and a relative willingness to research without fear of being persecuted … So it was not that we were in opposition to the system. We could make criticism. Criticism was part of the system.
When the Khrushchev Thaw gave way to the more repressive era of Brezhnev’s rule, sociological research was increasingly either ignored or suppressed by the authorities. The 1970s and early 1980s were the most challenging years for scholars. However, even then, the discipline remained loyal to the state. Sociologists were generally not prepared to enter into outright opposition nor, for that matter, openly embrace Washington as the progressive alternative to Moscow. Sociology was not, in this regard, a dissident discipline. Relatively few scholars, for example, chose to emigrate. In our discussion in 2007, Vladimir Iadov, head of the Institute of Sociology in Moscow, summed up the attitude of the discipline to the dissident movement as follows: ‘We read everything. We sympathized. But we didn’t participate. We thought it was better to do something for our sociology than to sit in prison’ (interview with V. Iadov, Moscow). Rather, Soviet sociology aimed to propose policies that might be seized upon by an ‘enlightened’ section of the party-state bureaucracy and put into practice to improve the Soviet system. Thus, it was uniquely well placed to play a major role in the elaboration and defense of a reform agenda initiated by a section of the Communist Party.
Although Soviet sociology was not a dissident discipline, its representatives were influenced by the intellectual currents that ran through that movement. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, as the Thaw gave way to the era of the Brezhnev stagnation, a more ‘liberal socialist’ perspective began to emerge among the intelligentsia, in particular its dissident wing. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the suppression of the Prague Spring with its promise of ‘socialism with a human face’ fueled the development of a pessimistic attitude towards prospects for left-wing reform in the Soviet system. Dissidence transformed from criticism into avowed opposition to socialism (a personal account of such a transformation can be read in Alexeyeva and Goldberg, 1990). The ‘liberal socialist’ outlook combined sympathy for political pluralism with a more critical attitude towards the working class and the peasantry, which were increasingly viewed as incapable of playing a significant role in advancing political reforms because of their ideological and economic subservience to the state. Alongside this, ‘liberal socialists’ evinced growing support for market-based economic reforms, although they were skeptical that they could be implemented in the USSR (Shlyapentokh, 1990). During the 1970s, these intellectual currents filtered into Soviet sociology and intersected with scholars’ increasing awareness of the mounting socio-economic problems confronting the Soviet Union.
The Pre-Gorbachev Era: Soviet Sociology and What Ails Soviet Society
In the years leading up to Gorbachev’s rise to power, sociologists at some of the country’s leading research institutes began critiquing the country’s socio-economic system. As one observer noted: Although it has become common, both in Soviet and western writings about the USSR to characterize the early 1980s (the immediate pre-Gorbachev period) as years of ‘stagnation’, or at the very least, ‘near-stagnation’ in the Soviet system, … whatever the justification for applying this to the Soviet economy, it is not always recognized that this same period was a time of considerable intellectual ferment in the social science literature. (Yanowitch, 1989: vii)
Sociological research carried out during the previous decade had uncovered signs of significant strains building in the foundations of Soviet society. Growth had slowed severely (if not entirely ceased). Labor productivity was in a slump and industrial output had stagnated. The planning system was ineffective at yielding real improvements in quantity and quality. The existence of priority industries – special sectors of the economy targeted for relatively high levels of investment – and wage-leveling – the maintenance of low levels of official wage differentiation – divorced compensation from productivity and skill level. Layers of the scientific-technocratic intelligentsia felt they were undervalued relative to the working class, and were increasingly resentful about that fact. The shadow economy and corruption were on the rise as people exploited unofficial distribution channels and positions of power to accumulate wealth and satisfy unmet consumer demand. Social inequality was growing, fueling bitterness over the fact that some did not have the means to attain material comforts they saw others getting (Grant-Friedman, 2008). Sociologists were not only observers of these phenomena; they themselves hailed from a social layer that was disgruntled by the way in which resources and influence were distributed.
Soviet Sociology and the Market
The mounting crisis of Soviet society intersected with the increasingly right-wing (i.e. ‘liberal socialist’) political sympathies circulating among layers of the intelligentsia, as well as growing support within the Communist Party for some sort of ‘convergence between Western and Soviet economic systems’ (Reddaway and Glinski, 2001: 94). This manifested itself in the ‘ferment’ within the social science literature during the years immediately prior to Gorbachev’s ascension to power.
In 1983, sociologist Tatiana Zaslavskaia, who was working at the Institute of Economics and the Organization of Industrial Production (IEOIP) in Novosibirsk, delivered a report at a closed seminar that contained a sweeping criticism of socio-economic life in the USSR. Zaslavskaia, who had been trained as an economist, entered the discipline of sociology in the mid-1960s when she joined the faculty at IEOIP and headed up the division on social problems. Her specialty was rural economy and conditions of life in the countryside. When I asked Zaslavskaia in 2007 in Moscow to tell me what theoretical influences had shaped her thinking over the years, she replied, ‘We were all Marxists.’ Later she added, ‘What they taught as Marxism-Leninism – this never left much of an impression on me, but Marx’s economic, social-economic conceptions dominated (my thinking).’
The critique that she advanced in her 1983 report, however, indicated that she had begun to adopt a different outlook than that with which she herself consciously identified. According to Zaslavskaia, the Soviet crisis was the result of the use of ‘administrative’ over ‘economic’ measures to drive the labor process. The bureaucratic system of planning was based on top-down direction, which removed individual initiative and creativity from the production process. Zaslavskaia maintained that the administrative-planned economy rested upon and further developed an entrenched bureaucratic apparatus that was inherently resistant to change. The interests of this layer conflicted with those of other social groups, namely people employed in fields that promoted scientific-technological development – i.e. the poorly compensated but growing Soviet intelligentsia. She insisted that the ‘relations of production’ in Soviet society had come to lag behind the ‘forces of production’. The solution was the introduction of a system of ‘economic’ management, for as Zaslavskaia noted, there was an incorrect assumption in the USSR regarding ‘the inorganic nature of commodity and monetary relations for the socialist economy’ (Zaslavskaia, 1989a: 160). Over subsequent years it became clear that by this she meant the implementation of market-based mechanisms to guide production, steer inter-enterprise exchange, and determine workers’ compensation levels.
As Zaslavskaia was presenting her case in 1983, she observed that her proposed reforms would cater to the desires of certain layers of the population over others, creating substantial social frictions. The transition to ‘economic’ methods of management would be ‘accompanied by a certain redistribution of rights and responsibilities among various groups of workers’, improving things for ‘the managerial staff of the enterprises (associations), whose rights it has been proposed to widen sharply, and … the ordinary workers and engineering and technical personnel, who could use their individual capabilities more fully, work more effectively and receive a higher salary’ (Zaslavskaia, 1989a: 172). In short, ‘the more qualified, energetic and active representatives of these groups’, who wanted ‘to realize themselves more fully in their work, and to have better living conditions’ would be opposed by the ‘the more apathetic, the more elderly, and the less qualified groups of workers’, who would not want to accept salary increases contingent upon increasing productivity (Zaslavskaia, 1989a: 172). Zaslavskaia both warned that those on the bottom of the Soviet social heap would tend to lose out from her proposed reforms and attempted to justify this outcome as necessary for the healthy functioning of society. While highly critical of the party-state bureaucracy, the Novosibirsk Report in effect actually appealed to one section of this ruling elite – the reform-minded wing – to take action against another section of it – the bureaucratic stalwarts.
The reform process that Zaslavskaia proposed rested upon a particular understanding of the USSR’s socio-political and class dynamics. Zaslavskaia maintained that the less-skilled layers of the working class, in particular those employed in manual labor or menial mental tasks, were the natural allies of the most conservative sections of the party-state bureaucracy because their jobs and wages rested upon the ‘bureaucratic’ defense of unproductive sectors of the economy. She foresaw that these social forces would resist the transition to ‘economic’ methods of management. In contrast, she insisted that the natural allies of the reform-minded wing of the party-state bureaucracy were the scientific-technological intelligentsia and skilled workers. While always a critic of the shadow economy, she also observed that the ‘spontaneous’ activity of workers outside the sphere of government regulation had clearly positive dimensions because it led to ‘the release of the workers’ creative forces, to the raising of their labor activity’ (Zaslavskaia, 1989a: 166). In that sense, the more enterprising layers of the population active in the shadow economy – i.e. the nascent petty bourgeoisie – were also allies of ‘economic’ methods of management.
Another object of Zaslavskaia’s critique, which would emerge more clearly in later writings (1989b), was the Soviet practice of ‘wage-leveling’. A frequent target of Soviet sociologists, ‘wage-leveling’ was thought to express the domination of bureaucratic over economic methods because compensation was not determined by (a) the quantity and quality of the product or (b) the education and skill level of the employee. Rather, it was set by government policies that artificially and irrationally capped wage differentiation based on administrative and political prerogatives. In short, wage-leveling meant that there was too much income equality in the Soviet Union.
Zaslavskaia observed that the excessive equalities within this sphere were offset by other inequalities elsewhere. In particular, the vast system of closed distribution networks meant that goods and services free of charge were invariably distributed unevenly and largely to the benefit of the better-off layers of society (1989b). The appropriate solution, however, was not measures to guarantee genuine equality of outcome, but rather those that would ensure real equality of opportunity (1989b). When coupled with state policies aimed at evening out ‘starting points’, the market appeared as the most equitable distribution mechanism possible in Soviet society because that would ensure the allocation of rewards based on economic, not bureaucratic, standards.
In advocating the initiation of market-based reforms in the USSR, Zaslavskaia was a representative within the discipline of sociology of an intellectual and political tendency with a long pedigree in the USSR. 4 There had been repeated experimentation, of varying lengths and degree, with the legalization of capitalist market relations inside the Soviet Union since the 1920s, when the government implemented its New Economic Policy (NEP, 1921–28). In her later writings, Zaslavskaia identified the NEP as a major inspiration for her work (Zaslavskaia and Rivkina, 1991). More immediately, Zaslavskaia’s mentor, the economist V. G. Venzher, was a central figure among a layer of Thaw-era intellectuals who advocated the relaxation of state control over certain sectors of the economy. While the Brezhnev era saw the state pull back from experimentation with reforms of this character, the pro-market sympathies evident within the policy debates of the 1960s were never totally expunged from the intelligentsia (or sections of the Communist Party).
Zaslavskaia’s research on the rural economy in the 1970s, which was crucial to shaping her views on what ailed Soviet society, reflected these tendencies. During the years leading up to the Novosibirsk Report, for example, she wrote extensively on Soviet collective farmers’ reliance on the sale of goods from small individual plots to sustain themselves in the face of low government prices for agricultural products. An important finding of her research was that there tended to be significantly higher levels of labor productivity in this economic sub-sector. During our interview in 2007 in Moscow when we were discussing what influenced her views, Zaslavskaia related to me a conversation that she had with an Estonian peasant in the 1970s. Having been deeply impressed by the work ethic and high living standard she found in the Estonian countryside, she asked one of the villagers why everything seemed to work so well. ‘The people here still remember capitalism’, he told her.
Soviet Sociology and the Problem of Equality
The same year that Zaslavskaia issued the Novosibirsk Report, Vadim Rogovin, a scholar working at the Institute of Sociological Research in Moscow, elaborated an alternate solution to Soviet society’s ills in a commentary entitled, The Problem of the Perfecting of Relations of Socio-economic Equality Among the Members of Developed Socialist Society and the Direction of Decisions in the Coming Period. 5 A copy of this document was sent to the Moscow City Committee of the Communist Party, bringing it to the attention of the authorities. Like Zaslavskaia’s report, it was classified. But unlike hers, it was never leaked to the Western press and until now, has never seen the light of day. Rogovin’s positions, a minority viewpoint in the discipline, would attract popular attention in subsequent years.
Rogovin had a distinctive personal and intellectual history. Born in 1937, like many of his fellow sociologists he came of age during the Khrushchev Thaw and was deeply influenced by the awakening of critical political and intellectual thought during that period. He spent the early years of his career working in the field of aesthetics, switching to sociology out of a desire to study the questions of social stratification and social justice. According to friends and relatives, Rogovin was moved to pursue this field of inquiry because for decades he had been quietly reading material by Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition, which he had surreptitiously obtained. The field of sociology was attractive to him because he thought it could provide insights into the question of social structure, and through that, the nature of the party-state bureaucracy. In this respect Rogovin was an exception to the general rule in Soviet sociology, as at the very outset of his work his research interests had conscious roots in the pre-Stalin era of Soviet social thought.
In his 1983 report, Rogovin noted many of the same socio-economic problems as Zaslavskaia, such as the disjuncture between compensation and productivity, education, and skill level. He also criticized wage-leveling. However, his overriding concern was the ‘deepening of a socially unjustified differentiation of incomes and the comforts of life’, which he attacked in great detail and with extremely sharp language. He wrote: Workers regularly encounter instances of unearned enrichment through the deceit and the ripping-off of the state and the people … Certain groups of the population have the means to meet their needs at a scale beyond any reasonable norms and outside of their relationship to social production … There does not exist any systematic control of sources of income and the acquisition of valuable goods.
6
Rogovin insisted that the existence of closed distribution channels had created significant variation in the purchasing power of the ruble for different social groups. While a narrow layer of the population had access to all the luxuries of life, the majority of Soviet citizens were having increasing difficulty accessing key necessities and basic comforts. When price increases and accessibility issues were taken into consideration, Rogovin insisted that real incomes for the majority of people, in contrast to official claims, were actually declining. The consequence of this fall was the expansion of the shadow economy, resulting in more inequality, growing cynicism, and ‘justifiable social discontent’. 7
Rather than lauding the shadow economy as pointing to the future of Soviet development, Rogovin insisted it was a drain on society that was incompatible with socialism. It needed to be reined in through reforms that allowed everyone to equally and fully realize their consumer needs in the state sector, appropriately compensated people for their labor and skills, and gave the government the tools necessary to monitor economic activity outside official spheres. Social stratification and the unequal distribution of resources, not the administrative-planning system, were the real source of the USSR’s burgeoning social problems. In a swipe at official claims that the Soviet Union was moving towards social homogeneity, Rogovin insisted that inequality expressed ‘in essence, the true social structure of the USSR’. 8
The reforms that he proposed rested on a multi-pronged approach of (a) redistribution policies aimed at securing genuine equality in living standards, (b) a ‘socially guaranteed maximum of incomes and material comforts’, (c) increased government oversight of the economy, including the institution of income declarations that required people to state the full value of their earnings, (d) a significant expansion of spending on pensions and family subsidies, as well as improvements to education, housing, and recreation that would eliminate stratification in access to state services, and (e) the cultivation of a culture of ‘reasonable consumption’ in the population. 9
In short, Rogovin advocated the opposite of Zaslavskaia’s market-oriented solution to the USSR’s socio-economic problems. His intention was to move against, not towards, the economic tendencies manifested in the shadow economy by eliminating its underlying causes and bringing it under state control. Outwardly his proposal had features of a statist solution; his suggested solutions entailed enhancing the power of the state to monitor socio-economic activity, restrict individual freedom of action in certain areas, promote social morality, and expand government-funded services. However, inasmuch as Rogovin’s proposals were intended to attack inequality, they took aim at the privileges of the party-state bureaucracy. Those individuals with the most hidden income, who benefited the greatest from unequally distributed state resources, and who were in the best position to exploit the shadow economy, were from this very social layer. Thus, Rogovin’s seemingly statist solution, if implemented, would have cut across the interests of state authorities. Furthermore, his proposed reforms were not simply directed against those layers of the party-state bureaucracy most wedded to outmoded sectors of the economy, as Zaslavskaia’s were, but at the elite in general, which would include its reform-minded wing. In his 1983 report one can see the kernel of an idea with roots in the writings of Trotsky and the Left Opposition – that Soviet society was burdened by a parasitic ruling caste committed to the defense of its privileges and power.
Unlike Zaslavskaia’s position, which was eventually embraced by the Gorbachev administration, Rogovin’s views found no support within the political establishment. While the archives contained no record of any discussion of Rogovin’s report by city authorities, the fact that it was brought to their attention is a sign that the contents had raised concerns within the leadership of the Institute of Sociological Research (ISR). Archival evidence does show that later discussions at the ISR of Rogovin’s work, in which he advanced similar positions, elicited a very negative response from certain colleagues. At one faculty meeting he was told that he had to be mindful that what he wrote would be seen by the highest levels of the Communist Party, and that his comments about the existence of ‘unjustified inequality’ in the USSR were groundless, as ‘there can be no such thing in principle’. 10
Despite the fact that Rogovin’s positions never received any sort of official backing, they were a manifestation, in a particularly concentrated form, of broader social sentiments. Among social scientists, others were raising concerns about the existence and spread of inequality (Ovsiannikov, 1986; Vengerov, 1983). More generally, as Reddaway and Glinski have noted, in the early 1980s discontent in the Soviet Union in no way translated into unqualified support for transitioning to a market-based economy along the lines proposed by Zaslavskaia. Rather, ‘dissent was widespread, concerned most of all with the gulf between rulers and ruled, and with obtaining social justice more than curbing, let alone dismantling, the socialist economy’ (Reddaway and Glinski, 2001: 88). Furthermore, the problem of inequality in Soviet society was an issue of longstanding and explosive political dimensions. On the one hand, egalitarianism had real roots in the country as a result of the 1917 revolution and government policies that had narrowed stratification during certain periods of Soviet history. On the other hand, the continued existence of substantial differences between the living standards of the masses and the party-state bureaucracy threatened the legitimacy of the regime. Sociology itself had fallen victim to this issue during the 1930s when it was repressed because of its association with the study of stratification.
The Spiral of Soviet Sociology and Perestroika
As perestroika was being implemented, the opposing viewpoints manifested in the work of Zaslavskaia and Rogovin over the questions of inequality and the market began to emerge center stage. They intersected with the concerns of the broader population, which was becoming actively involved in political life due to Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (openness), and the efforts of the ruling elite to navigate the transition to a market-based system. During this period, Soviet sociology was experiencing a level of political and institutional recognition never before witnessed in its post-war history.
Zaslavskaia, who first worked with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1982 when he consulted a group of social scientists about reforms in Soviet agriculture, spearheaded the relationship between Soviet sociology and the Gorbachev regime. In the immediate aftermath of the issuing of the Novosibirsk Report and its leak to the Western press, the authorities made life difficult for her. However, this period passed relatively quickly. She was brought into the fold of the country’s political elite as the Communist Party prepared its restructuring program, which was drawn heavily from her work. Zaslavskaia participated in the drafting of Gorbachev’s 1986 speech at the 27th Party Congress, in which he outlined perestroika in detail (Zaslavskaia, 1990).
During that same year, the Communist Party appointed Zaslavskaia head of the Soviet Sociological Association (SSA). At the SSA meeting at which her appointment occurred, Zaslavskaia gave a speech entitled, The Role of Sociology in the Acceleration of the Development of Soviet Society. The speech was effectively a manifesto that insisted that sociology could and must act as an instrument of perestroika, which demanded ‘hundreds and thousands of sociologically thought-out and grounded decisions’ (Zaslavskaia, 1987: 4). In return, sociologists should be given greater access to the halls of power, such that sociology would no longer ‘be forced to content itself with a monologue’ with the organs of rule (Zaslavskaia, 1987: 12). Soviet sociology wanted to be transformed from a discipline of often overlooked and frequently chastised social critics into a discipline of fully recognized intellectual elites with real political influence. At the same time, perestroika promised to be the realization of scholars’ decades-long struggle to reform Soviet society from within.
In 1988 the Central Committee of the Communist Party passed a resolution entitled, On Enhancing the Role of Marxist-Leninist Sociology in the Solution of Key Problems of Soviet Society. The document officially recognized sociology as a fully independent sphere of scholarship and research, as opposed to a sub-field of philosophy or historical materialism. It called for a significant expansion in the training of sociologists and the teaching of sociology at all levels of the educational system, actions that would place significant resources at the disposal of the discipline. The promotion of Soviet sociology went beyond simply a deepening relationship between the discipline and the Kremlin. The public audience for sociology also grew substantially during this period, as the discipline was promoted by the state. In 1986 Sotsiologicheskie Issledovaniia (Sociological Research), the discipline’s flagship journal, had a print run of 20,000 (Batygin, 2002). Between 1986 and 1988 it further doubled in circulation. By 1989 Sociological Research could be bought at newsstands (Shalin, 1990). Sociologists regularly published in the mainstream press and the print media of top party-state institutions.
As Soviet sociology saw its prestige and influence grow, the Communist Party implemented its turn to ‘economic’ methods of management, which became more radical as the years progressed (Aslund, 1989). Initially, the government passed laws that eliminated wage-leveling, legalized private business in a highly limited form, and allowed foreign ownership of large minority stakes in Soviet enterprises. Eventually, the government implemented measures that overturned economic principles upon which the country had operated for decades. The Law on State Enterprises, which took effect in January 1988, established enterprise independence and self-financing in industry. In addition to giving enterprises the right to sell a portion of their products on the market, they were allowed significant latitude in determining which product lines they would produce once state delivery targets were met (Goldman, 1993). Managers, to be democratically elected by the enterprise workforce, were finally given full authority to set wages. In short, production for the market, the attainment of profit, and the linking of wages to output became an established, albeit still circumscribed, goal of industrial activity. The Law on Cooperatives, which legalized private business in services, manufacturing, and foreign trade, was even more radical. It took effect in mid-1988. Tax rates were set low. Retail prices were allowed to fluctuate with the market. While hiring outside labor was technically illegal, non-co-op-members could be employed on a contractual basis, meaning that there was effectively a private labor market. The law gave cooperatives enough legal independence and rights over the disposal of their resources that the line between state and private property began to blur (Aslund, 1989).
The result was a total crisis in the state sector of the economy and the exacerbation of widespread shortages in food, clothing, and other basic necessities. The rate of economic growth, as measured by national income and output, fell below planned targets and steadily declined from 1986 onwards. By 1990, the country was experiencing negative growth (Elliot, 1995). Enterprise and banking reforms undercut the government’s ability to control the money supply and regulate credit, contributing to a general state of fiscal chaos in the country. At many workplaces and institutions, whether out of a desire for personal enrichment, economic necessity, or some combination of the two, ‘self-financing’ meant, in practice, financing oneself. One result was inflation, as enterprise managers used their newly attained profits, often acquired by using monopoly power or phasing out the production of cheap goods, to increase wages well beyond what was dictated by productivity growth.
In 1989, inflation reached 19 percent, eroding whatever gains the population had made in income over the preceding years. As one scholar has noted, ‘When account is taken of additional costs, real per capita income and real wages probably decreased, particularly for the bottom half of the population’ (Elliot, 1995: 33). The collapse of the state sector increased people’s efforts to seek goods and services in the cooperative and shadow markets, which after 1988 began to merge with one another. Underground businesses and cooperatives had great leeway to set prices because they faced little to no competition from the state sector. They charged whatever the market would bear, resulting in huge income disparities (Elliot, 1995).
As social inequality grew rapidly, so did discontent among the wider population, a fact noted by Soviet sociologists (Antonsenkov and Degtiarev, 1988; Batygin, 1989; Burmikina, 1988; Iliasov and Mukhhammetberdiev, 1988). As one emigre Soviet scholar observed: One interesting insight that recent sociological studies have to offer is that public opinion in the Soviet Union is not entirely behind Gorbachev in his efforts to privatize the economy. The initially sympathetic attitude toward private entrepreneurship is apparently giving way to a feeling of concern and doubt. Nearly half of the Soviet people now mistrust and/or categorically oppose newly founded cooperative enterprises, which are widely blamed for high prices and questionable business practices (Ulybin 1988). Another survey (Ponikarov & Dunin 1988) brings to light this intriguing fact: the opportunity to augment one’s income under present economic reforms is not uniformly welcome by Soviet workers, many of whom prefer a more egalitarian income distribution to a system that rewards individual efforts and breeds sizable disparity in incomes. (Shalin, 1990: 1028)
The Gorbachev regime faced mounting political turmoil, in which the issue of stratification played a central role. This manifested itself in 1989, for example, when miners’ strikes gripped the country.
As perestroika accelerated and political tensions rose, the differing viewpoints within Soviet sociology over the place of equality in a socialist society emerged into public view. During the mid-to-late 1980s this took the form of an ongoing exchange in the popular press between Gennadii Lisichkin, an economist who had once worked at the Institute of Sociological Research in Moscow and had ties to the sociology community, and Rogovin. A key element of the debate that unfolded had to do with the meaning of justice in a socialist society: Were the perestroika reforms just or not and did they correspond to Soviet principles? The issue of social justice was a frequent topic of discussion in Soviet sociology (as well as other disciplines); it provided scholars with a framework within which to assess the distribution of resources in society, make critical comments about the existing state of affairs, bring issues to the attention of the Communist Party, and often carry on a highly politicized discussion under the cover of a topic that could be considered a legitimate area of inquiry by state officials. 11
Over the course of 1984 and 1985 Rogovin published a series of articles in mainstream newspapers outlining many of the positions he elaborated in his classified 1983 report. He called for: (a) the establishment of a universal guaranteed social minimum in living standards and a social maximum in earnings, (b) further campaigns against ‘unearned’ incomes, (c) the imposition of taxes on inheritance and money made in the private sector, (d) the institution of limits on the acquisition of personal property, (e) the creation of income declarations, in which citizens would be required to list the amounts and sources of all their earnings, (f) further efforts to combat the growth of a consumerist mentality, and (g) ‘a centrally directed redistribution of the population’s incomes and personal property’ so as to ensure that all members of society ‘could be saved from unnecessary material troubles and deprivations’ (Rogovin, 1984a,b, 1985, 2007a,b,c). Rogovin’s articles provoked a significant response from the readers of Komsomolskaia Pravda (Komsomol Truth), where they were published. He received more than 4000 letters from the public, a majority of which supported his views. This fact was noted in the West by Sovietologists (Aage, 1989) and by Rogovin’s colleagues at the Institute of Sociological Research. 12
On 19 February 1986 Lisichkin penned what would be the first of a series of articles attacking both Rogovin and those readers that shared his opinions. ‘Charity from someone else’s pocket’ was the title of a short commentary published in one of the country’s leading weeklies, Literaturnaia Gazeta (Literary Gazette). He began the piece by expressing horror at those letter writers who were hostile to consumerism, insisting that a desire to improve one’s material position was entirely natural and the express goal of perestroika. Lisichkin wrote: To whom, precisely, are these warnings[13] addressed? To those who through their own hard work and frugal life managed to acquire something and now, for some reason, must deny themselves those services and things that enrich life and create a pleasant atmosphere? (Lisichkin, 1986: 8)
He insisted that growing social inequality in the Soviet Union was not a violation of socialism. Lisichkin maintained that because the means of production were not privately owned, nothing exploitative was or could occur in Soviet society. Therefore, readers’ negative attitudes towards people with high incomes and material comforts were simply the envy of the lazy. He maintained that Rogovin’s proposals would unleash a socio-economic war against the hard-working average citizen and lamented the fact that a ‘redistributive mood’ remained quite alive in the population. Lisichkin made a thinly veiled comparison between Rogovin’s proposal and Stalin’s collectivization of the peasantry.
In 1988, Lisichkin wrote his most extensive reply, sub-titled ‘Is it shameful to earn a lot?’ In response to Rogovin’s demand that the decile-wage ratio not be allowed to rise higher than 3:1, Lisichkin maintained that Rogovin wanted to perpetuate a stagnant economy, with the government having ‘a hand in everyone’s pocket’ (Lisichkin, 1988: 218), squashing whatever minimal initiative existed in Soviet society. He accused Rogovin of wanting to strengthen the bureaucracy and implied that he was a Stalinist. In addition to these ills, Rogovin was guilty of ‘Luddism’ (Lisichkin, 1988: 212), religious-like preaching, misquoting Marx to find support for his arguments, wanting the state to have the power to move people around ‘like cattle’ (p. 217), defending a deficit-system of distribution based on ‘ration cards’ (p. 216), and being a ‘demagogue’ (p. 219), a ‘war communist’ (p. 223), and a ‘left-wing infantile’ communist (p. 225).
Commenting on this exchange, Zaslavskaia argued that not only was Lisichkin correct, but that he was defending a genuinely socialist position. There is, she observed, a certain wariness evident in Soviet society towards people wishing to achieve a substantial increase in their earnings by working overtime, as though they were thus expressing a non-socialist ideology. This is probably inexplicable to the Western reader. After all, the very principle of socialism states: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his work’, thus, as it were, urging all members of society to work more and better, with the promise that life will be better for them as a result. What’s going on then? How is it possible that an article by a well-known publicist, G. S. Lisichkin, under the heading ‘Is it shameful to earn a lot?’ [must] use now this argument … to prove that to have a high income is not in itself shameful – it is shameful only if it is not earned by working. Here, it seems to me, we are dealing with a sort of mass ‘aberration’ from a socialist viewpoint, with a widely held conviction that ‘you don’t get rich by honest labor’ and that, therefore, anyone living well and not in want is to some degree a cheat, swindler, or bribe-taker. (Zaslavskaia, 1990: 55)
In their critiques of Rogovin, Lisichkin and Zaslavskaia made a concerted effort to not only argue that inequality was just, but that it was an inherent feature of a socialist society. In other words, equality and socialism had nothing to do with each other. The fact that Soviet society was not moving in the direction of greater social homogeneity, an official state-endorsed goal of previous decades, was not of particular political significance. Thus, it was possible to maintain that the market-oriented reforms being implemented at the time, which were clearly leading to growing social polarization, were not an attack on the socialist foundations of Soviet society. Rather, inasmuch as the market mechanisms of perestroika were inherently anti-bureaucratic and rewarded people ‘according to work’, they embodied a higher form of socialist justice than what existed previously. Ironically enough, in taking this position Lisichkin and Zaslavskaia were actually embracing a conception enshrined by Stalin in the 1936 Soviet constitution, when the true meaning of socialism was determined to be ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his work’. 14 Basing herself on this formulation, Zaslavskaia argued that in its effort to fulfill the demands of ‘socialist justice … the state obviously cannot have as its goal the uniform enhancement of the degree of satisfaction of the needs of all elements of the social structure’. Rather, ‘the implementation of a strong social policy means the systematic differentiation of the growth of the well-being of population groups that differ substantially in their role in the socioeconomic development of society’ (Zaslavskaia, 1989b: 124–5). As a force for socio-economic differentiation, the market appeared as the most effective tool of socialist social policy.
This effort to re-conceptualize the relationship between the market, equality, and socialism culminated in the early 1990s in the claim that perestroika was actually a ‘second socialist revolution’ (Zaslavskaia, 1990). As a consequence of this ‘second socialist revolution’, however, the state would no longer be the sole owner of ‘socialist’ property, but rather this right would be shared among individuals in society. Furthermore, the role of the state in economic life was to ‘not merely refrain from acting against [the objective] laws [of the market] but, on the contrary, [to] apply them in the interests of society’ (Zaslavskaia, 1990: 62). In other words, Soviet society was moving towards a more profound iteration of socialism, except that it looked a lot like capitalism.
As the dominant forces within Soviet sociology promoted this idea about the relationship between the market, equality, and socialism, they increasingly came up against the fact that from the standpoint of the working class, perestroika did not seem to be bringing more socialist justice to their everyday lives (Shalin, 1990). In response to these growing social tensions, the pro-perestroika wing of sociology argued that the fall in living standards being experienced by wide layers of the population was a ‘social price’ which had ‘to be paid for the acceleration of social and economic development in the country, for getting rid of [its] backwardness’ (Zaslavskaia, 1988: 256). The fact that many workers did not recognize that perestroika was in their interest, was largely the result of their own ignorance. Zaslavskaia wrote, for example: The bulk of the working class do not yet have a deep understanding of the concept of perestroika; they have not yet grasped how its measures interrelate, or how much it supports their own basic interests. This is hardly surprising; along with cadre workers, the working class comprises many people who are poorly educated, badly trained, and limited in their social and political outlook. For that matter, socially passive people abound within the working class, alongside the convinced supporters of perestroika. (Zaslavskaia, 1990: 165)
Thus, even as the dominant forces within the discipline were insisting on the inherently progressive and socialist character of market reform and rising inequality, they actively sought to delegitimize sentiments within the population that ran counter to this view, cultivating an anti-working-class attitude in the process. As the market and inequality became key to the very definition of socialism, the meaning of ‘socialist justice’ was detached from its class moorings in the social interests of the proletariat. In a 1992 interview, Zaslavskaia explained that because she had come to the conclusion that the USSR was not a classless society, the concept of equality had to be removed from the concept of socialist justice (Zaslavskaia, 1997).
The positions promoted by the dominant forces within Soviet sociology dovetailed with the continual efforts of the Gorbachev regime to insist that its policies were not aimed at undermining the entire Soviet system, but rather at bringing more socialism to the Soviet people, in an effort to neutralize working class opposition. It was not until 2010 that the former Communist Party General Secretary publicly admitted, in a 13 March editorial in the New York Times, that he and his colleagues ‘came a long way in a short time – moving from trying to repair the existing system to recognizing the need to replace it’ (Gorbachev, 2010). During the 1980s, the legitimacy of perestroika rested upon the denial of this very fact. Had the Communist Party openly proclaimed the intention of perestroika to be ‘to replace’ the Soviet system, this would have galvanized social opposition to the reform process.
Indeed, archival sources indicate that such sentiments were growing as perestroika wore on, to the concern of both top government officials and leading sociologists. In 1989, for example, Director of the Institute of Sociology Vladimir Iadov received a memo from the Deputy Director of the Ideology Division of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Iadov was asked to reply to a letter written to Mikhail Gorbachev by a rank-and-file member of the Communist Party. The Central Committee wanted a strong response because the letter writer’s assessments were ‘widespread (representative) [sic] among the working class’. According to Iadov, the letter writer expressed an ‘an extremely ultra-leftist ideology’ and called for the formation of ‘a new party … the members of which will be elected by the working masses’, who would lead a ‘class war’ for genuine restructuring. As the exchange makes clear, the respondents understood that such a ‘class war’ would not be to their favor (Iadov, 1998).
In 1988, Moshe Lewin observed that the Gorbachev regime confronted a complex political task. It needed the support of the ‘educated professional and intellectual classes’ and was striving to ‘welcome these classes into the political process as the old regime’s bureaucratic state could not’. At the same time, the working classes also ‘had to be accommodated, wooed, and somehow, repoliticized’ (Lewin, 1988: 124). The experience of Soviet sociology during the 1980s embodied both dimensions of this process.
The alliance between Soviet sociology and the Gorbachev administration emerged for a variety of complex reasons. Material interests played a role. As sociology became a major advocate for perestroika, the discipline was heavily promoted by the state, opening up new opportunities for leading scholars to see real gains in status, socio-economic position, and political influence. Like other sections of the intelligentsia, many sociologists felt that the official wage-leveling policies enacted in the USSR in the post-war period undervalued their contributions to society relative to the industrial working class. From approximately 1955 onwards, wage differentials between manual and non-manual workers had systematically narrowed such that the average monthly wage of ‘technical-engineering personnel’ was only 1.1 times that of manual workers by 1980 (Flakierski, 1993). This equalizing tendency was offset by extensive inequalities in official and unofficial access to a range of material benefits, the lion’s share of which were doled out to the party-state bureaucracy and other layers of the elite, including the upper echelons of the intelligentsia. Nonetheless, official wage leveling contributed to the growth of social resentment among layers of the population who felt that their education and skill levels were not duly rewarded. Perestroika promised to fundamentally change this situation.
However, the relationship that developed between the discipline and the state was not simply the product of self-interest. There was a convergence between the pro-market agenda that had taken root within a section of the Communist Party by the early 1980s (Reddaway and Glinski, 2001) and the political and intellectual orientation of Soviet sociology as it had been evolving for decades. Emerging out of the Khrushchev Thaw and supported institutionally by the Soviet state, sociology was at one and the same time critical of bureaucratism and committed to reforming the Soviet system from within. While generally supportive of the dissident outlook, sociology never entered into outright opposition. Rather, the discipline was oriented towards pressuring supposedly more thoughtful elements of the regime to adopt progressive policies. Perestroika fulfilled that mission.
Underlying scholars’ embrace of inequality and market mechanisms was a fervent belief that the market was inherently anti-bureaucratic, a force capable of breaking up the power of those layers of the party-state regime that were unjustly feeding off state property. At the time, little consideration was given to the possibility that pro-market forces inside the party-state bureaucracy would use their positions to gain undue economic power in a market environment. In my 2007 interview with Zaslavskaia in Moscow, I asked whether or not she ever considered the fact that the nomenklatura (i.e. the highest levels of the party-state elite) would unfairly reap the benefits of the Gorbachev reforms. She replied by saying, ‘This problem became very clear – that people did not want to give up what they had. But there wasn’t anyone else to govern. But the scale [of it] we didn’t expect. We should have, but we weren’t experienced enough.’ She then made one additional observation. ‘The nomenklatura was on the other side’, she said. The nomenklatura for her primarily meant anti-perestroika hardliners. This perception of the alignment of social forces around perestroika in and of itself precluded the possibility of the party-state bureaucracy using its power to reap the rewards of the market transition. The historical inability of Soviet sociology to ever openly study or debate the origins of the ruling elite, its relationship to economic life in the country, and its socio-political interests inhibited scholars’ ability to adopt a more critical attitude towards all sections of the party-state bureaucracy. The emasculation of Soviet Marxism by Stalin’s purges, sociology’s overwhelmingly empirical focus, and the theoretical challenges that the discipline faced did not help matters.
Furthermore, decades of relative intellectual isolation meant that Soviet sociologists had a very weak understanding of the way in which markets function. In our 2007 interview in Moscow, Rozalina Rivkina, Zaslavskaia’s co-author of the book Sotsiologiia Ekonomicheskoi Zhizni (The Sociology of Economic Life) and a proponent of perestroika, objected when I asked her what she thought ‘the market’ was during the 1980s. ‘The market is an economic question. Why are you asking me about it? Sociology studied social groups, not the market’, she said. When probing the same question with a leading figure among today’s Russian economic sociologists in 2007, I was told, ‘In the 1980s I don’t think people had any understanding of what “the market” was. An understanding of “the market” only appeared in the 1990s … In the 1980s it was all rhetoric’ (interview with V Radaev, Moscow).
Inasmuch as Zaslavskaia and pro-perestroika sociologists had any conception of the market, it was rooted in their understanding of the NEP (1921–28) era in Soviet history, which, in Zaslavskaia’s own words, they ‘idealized’ (interview with T. Zaslavskaia, 2007). During that time, the Soviet regime legalized small businesses producing for a profit. In addition, the state promoted wage differentiation as a way to increase output, bring ‘bourgeois specialists’ into the employ of the government, and encourage the labor of skilled workers and professionals. Foreign trade, banking, and large-scale industry, however, remained under state control. The NEP resulted, for a period of time, in a significant upswing in the Soviet economy. It also unleashed massive economic imbalances and ultimately, a general crisis. In advocating the policy, Lenin explicitly stated that NEP represented a concession to capitalist tendencies. He warned that it posed a danger to the socialist foundations of Soviet society.
In idealizing the NEP era, pro-perestroika sociologists focused almost exclusively on the initial positive impact that NEP policies had on the Soviet economy and the fact that Lenin himself had proposed the measures in 1921. By equating perestroika with the NEP and overlooking Lenin’s warning about the danger of capitalist restoration, the argument could be made that Gorbachev’s policies were a return to Leninism and a higher form of socialism. Another dimension of the NEP period often overlooked by pro-perestroika sociologists was the fact that the NEP coincided with Stalin’s consolidation of power and the early stages of the bureaucratization of political life in the Soviet Union. By setting aside this historical fact, it was possible to maintain that the market was inherently anti-bureaucratic.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Soviet sociology ended up helping lay the ideological groundwork upon which the transition to capitalism occurred. By portraying pro-market reforms as a socialist venture, attacking the principle of equality, and insisting that the critics of perestroika were allies of bureaucratic reaction, Soviet sociology legitimized the actions of the ruling elite as it orchestrated the reintroduction of the market and navigated a potentially explosive political situation. Ironically, this was a factor that allowed key sections of the party-state bureaucracy to ensure the continuity of their power and privileges through the transition.
Soviet sociology remained a faithful supporter of perestroika and Gorbachev till the very end. Once Gorbachev’s regime collapsed, several leading figures in the discipline joined the Yeltsin administration. In the early months of Yeltsin’s regime, Zaslavskaia took part in a government advisory council tasked with assessing socio-economic conditions in the country and the impact of further market reforms. Ovsei Shkaratan, one of the country’s top scholars on the sociology of work, was asked to serve as Minister of Labor. He refused because, as he explained to me in Moscow in 2007, they needed someone stronger than him to implement the mass layoffs coming down the pipeline. Boris Grushin, a leading public opinion researcher, also briefly served in the Yeltsin government (Firsov, 2001). Zaslavskaia left the government council she was serving on and completely broke relations with the Yeltsin administration when it became apparent to her that the president was using her and other sociologists as window dressing while he extended his corrupt rule (interview with Zaslavskaia, Moscow).
Soviet sociologists’ early enthusiasm for the Yeltsin administration dissipated rather quickly. In the early 1990s, Zaslavskaia began writing pieces criticizing the criminality seizing all aspects of socio-economic life and documenting the population’s precipitous decline in living standards. Overall, the 1990s were a period of rather profound disillusionment for Soviet sociology. The discipline of perestroika did not foresee that the summit upon which it stood during the Gorbachev years was really a precipice. Sharing the same fate as many other institutions that witnessed the disappearance of state funding, Soviet sociology found itself financially ruined in the aftermath of the country’s collapse.
For his part, Rogovin moved increasingly to the left over the course of the late 1980s. By the end of the decade, he was a vocal critic of Gorbachev’s economic reforms. His writings on social justice increasingly focused on historical issues, in particular the relationship between Stalin’s rise to power and the growth of social inequality in the USSR. What began as a disagreement within the discipline of sociology over socio-economic policy evolved into a debate about the lessons of Soviet history, with pro-perestroika sociologists advancing a very different analysis of the relationship between stratification and bureaucracy than that advocated by Rogovin. By the early 1990s, Rogovin had become an open partisan of Trotskyism. He spent the last eight years of his life writing a seven-volume series on the history of Stalinism and the opposition to Stalin’s rule inside and outside the USSR. His political evolution left him relatively isolated within his discipline. While Rogovin continued to command the respect of his colleagues at the Institute of Sociology and maintained close relations with a number of scholars, none of them fully shared his views. In the extensive Russian-language literature on the history of Soviet sociology, one will find no mention of his work.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank three anonymous reviews and the editor of Critical Sociology for their helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this article.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.