Authors

Discussion

Soviet social sciences, the humanities and the system of doctoral education were ideological by virtue of their creation for a long time. One of the most classic examples was sociology, which received the status of a “bourgeois invention” and was banned within research institutions in the country for a while.

With the establishment of the Institute for Concrete Social Research in the USSR, the final formal institutionalization of sociology was eventually achieved. The ideological cleansing of the ICSI in 1972-1974 and the establishment of the Institute for Social Research led to greater ideological control of this institution and its eventual  re-orientation towards Marxist sociology and criticism of the “bourgeois sciences”.  

During the period of perestroika, a course was taken towards “new political thinking” and liberalization, which affected sociology and the system of doctoral training. In 1988, sociology was included in the rubricator of scientific specializations of the Higher Attestation Commission (the organization responsible for the validation of the doctoral degrees) and it became possible to obtain the degree of candidate of sociological sciences.

Moreover, in 1989 the first departments of sociology in the USSR were opened at Leningrad State University and Moscow State University. At the same time, the Academy of Social Sciences under the Central Committee of the CPSU existed, which focused mostly on training of the Communist Party employees, academics in a wide range of social sciences and where such transformations were less visible.

This paper is focused on the practices of justification of Soviet sociology uniqueness in Soviet social science via content analysis of the abstracts of the doctoral dissertations defended at Institute of Sociology of the USSR Academy of Sciences and Academy of Social Sciences under the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1988-1991. The empirical base of the study includes the texts of 99 dissertation summaries, which are available in the open access catalogs of the Russian State Library (“C5 Sociology” rubricator). A comparative analysis of works is based on the presence of the objective and subjective criteria of the justification of the Soviet sociology uniqueness in the dissertations.

The article also deals with the position of sociology in the context of Soviet education and with institutional features of the Soviet doctoral studies from historical standpoints, taking into account the changes that have taken place in such a system. Additionally, this research is accompanied by the narratives on the uniqueness and localization of the knowledge production that exists in scientific discussions worldwide.

The text of the article serves as an empirically proved reminder from the past for the modern system of doctoral education and its possible ideologization due to the increasingly isolationist will of the current Russian government.