The Academy of the Social Sciences of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

1950 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-141
Author(s):  
Mark G. Field
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social

Science and Politics in the U.S.S.R.: The Genetics Debate

1951 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 486-519 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela N. Wrinch
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World Culture ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
World Science ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The Social ◽  
Science And Politics

In the Soviet Union, views on all intellectual subjects—the social sciences, philosophy, and even the biological and physical sciences—are frequently regarded as expressions of political views. As a consequence, all intellectual fields are considered appropriate arenas for the struggle against “reaction” and other supposed manifestations of “bourgeois” ideology. To consider science a-political and supra-national, or to speak approvingly of “world science” or “world culture,” is to subscribe to the “bourgeois” ideology of “cosmopolitism”—an ideology which is assumed by virtue of its universalist emphasis to deprecate the contributions to culture made by individual nations.

On the Meaning of “Sovietology”

1998 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aryeh L. Unger
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The Other ◽  
Disciplinary Identity ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
Common Area ◽  
Critical Scrutiny ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Western Scholarship

The article attempts to explicate the meaning of “Sovietology.” It traces the origins of the term and discusses the uses to which it has been put in the scholarly literature. Two different meanings have been attached to the term. One reflects the understanding of Sovietology as the study of Soviet politics; the other views it as a “basket” of several, variously specified, disciplines in the social sciences and—less often—the humanities, distinguished by a common area orientation. The resultant ambiguity has blurred Sovietology's disciplinary identity. Now that the record of Western scholarship on the Soviet Union has become the subject of critical scrutiny and debate, it is especially important that the meaning of “Sovietology” be clearly stipulated.

Social Science’s Cold War

2019 ◽  
pp. 65-90
Author(s):  
Michael C. Desch
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
World War ◽  
Security Environment ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

This chapter details how with the end of the Second World War, social science disciplines were pulled in two diametrically opposed directions. The general intellectual climate of the post-World War II/early Cold War era was one of great optimism about professionalizing and modernizing the social sciences on the model of the natural sciences. This impulse especially affected political science. However, the inherent tensions between “rigor” and “relevance” reasserted themselves once again, and it became clear that a peacetime choice between them might have to be made. On the one hand, the experience of the war, and the growing realization that the country faced a protracted period of rivalry with the Soviet Union, encouraged the disciplines to try to remain relevant to policy. On the other hand, the mixed security environment and desire to remake the social sciences in the image of the natural sciences eventually pushed them away from it.

Soviet Politics and the Group Approach: A Conceptual Note

Slavic Review ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
David E. Langsam ◽  
David W. Paul
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Group Theory ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Interest Group ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soviet System ◽  
Group Approach ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social

One of the “Great Debates” among Soviet specialists in the social sciences today concerns the applicability of interest group theory to the study of Soviet politics. Though a large number of specialists have accepted the notion that interest groups do indeed play a certain kind of role in the Soviet system, there are still those who hold to the opinion, once taken for granted but in recent years challenged, that interest group theory simply does not apply to the Soviet Union. The strength of the latter argument lies in the fact that in the USSR interest groups do not operate publicly and openly, as they do in the United States; therefore, interest group theory as developed to fit the American context cannot describe or explain the dynamic processes of policymaking in Russia.

Nationality Question in the Resolutions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1898–1964

1977 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-201
Author(s):  
Silvia P. Forgus
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Situational Factors ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Domestic Power

Since its conception in 1898 the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has had to contend with the nationality question. The Party has had to formulate programs and make organizational and functional decisions pertaining to national rights. It has had to dwell on political aspects of the issue and adopt resolutions touching on the social, economic, and cultural problems of non-Russian nations in the Russian Empire and the Soviet State. What were these resolutions and what effect, if any, did ideological considerations, domestic power struggles, situational factors, and personal styles of the party leaders have on the resolutions?

Soviet and Muslim

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eren Tasar
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Legal Protection ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
Soviet Central Asia

Long associated with its aggressive promotion of atheism, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union adopted a nuanced, flexible, and often contradictory approach toward Islam in the USSR’s largest Muslim region, Central Asia. “Soviet and Muslim” demonstrates how the Soviet state unwittingly set in motion a process of institutionalization during World War II that culminated in a permanent space for Islam in a society ruled by atheists. Central Asia was the sole Muslim region of the former Russian empire to lack a centralized Islamic organization, or muftiate. When the Soviet leader Stalin created such a body for the region as part of his religious reforms during World War II, he acknowledged that the Muslim faith could enjoy some legal protection under Communist rule. From a skeletal and disorganized body run by one family of Islamic scholars out of a modest house in Tashkent’s old city, this muftiate acquired great political importance in the eyes of Soviet policymakers, and equally significant symbolic significance for many Muslims. This book argues that Islam did not merely “survive” the decades from World War II until the Soviet collapse in 1991, but actively shaped the political and social context of Soviet Central Asia. Muslim figures, institutions, and practices evolved in response to the social and political reality of Communist rule. Through an analysis that spans all aspects of Islam under Soviet rule—from debates about religion inside the Communist Party, to the muftiate’s efforts to acquire control over mosques across Central Asia, changes in Islamic practices and dogma, and overseas propaganda targeting the Islamic World—Soviet and Muslim offers a radical new reading of Islam’s resilience and evolution under atheist rule.

Ten Theories in Search of Reality: The Prediction of Soviet Behavior in the Social Sciences

1958 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Bell
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Soviet Rule ◽  
Human History ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
Complete Bibliography ◽  
The Way

Surely, more has been written about the Russian Revolution and the ensuing forty years of Soviet rule than about any comparable episode in human history. The bibliography of items on the French Revolution occupies, it is said, one wall of the Bibliothéque Nationale. A complete bibliography on the Soviet Union—which is yet to be compiledand may never be because of the geometric rate at which it multiplies—would probably make that earlier cenotaph to scholarship shrink the way in which the earlier tombs diminished before the great complex at Karnak.

scholarly journals A Context-Grounded Approach to Religious Freedom: The Case of Orthodoxy in the Moldovan Republic

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Davide N. Carnevale
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Right

This paper explores the relationship between human rights and social analysis within the main historical and theoretical perspectives adopted by social sciences. In particular, religious freedom will be analysed as one of the central issues in the recent engagement of the social sciences with human rights. After examining current narratives and mainstream approaches of the social sciences towards the right to religious freedom, this article will then underline the importance of a social epistemology which goes beyond a normative and legal perspective, bridging the gap between the framework of human rights and the social roles of religion in context. Within this framework, religious freedom represents a social construct, whose perception, definition and implementation dynamically evolves according to its influence, at different levels, in the lived dimension of social relations. The second part of the article proposes a context-grounded analysis of religious freedom in the Republic of Moldova. This case study is characterised by the impressive growth of Orthodoxy after the demise of the Soviet Union and by a complex and contradictory political approach towards religious freedom, both as a legal standard and as a concept. Emerging through the analysis of local political narratives and some preliminary ethnographical observations, the social importance of religion will be investigated both as a governmental instrument and as an embodied means of dealing with widespread socio-economic insecurity, creating tensions between religious rootedness and religious freedom. The local debate on religious freedom will then be related to the influence of geopolitical borders, the topic of traditional identity and the religious form of adaptation to the ineffectiveness of the new secular local policies, with orthodox institutions and parishes having new socio-political roles at both a global and local scale.

scholarly journals Workers, the Intelligentsia and Marxist Parties: St Petersburg, 1895–1917 and Shanghai, 1921–1927

1996 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve A. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Social Position ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
Party State ◽  
Contextual Differences

SummaryThe article investigates relations between workers and intellectuals in the pre-revolutionary Bolshevik Party in St Petersburg and the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai. It commences with a background examination of the social position and traditions of the intelligentsia in each country and the emergence of a stratum of so-called “conscious” workers. The position of workers in each party is then analysed, especially with respect to leadership, and the nature of tensions between workers and intellectuals explored. The investigation demonstrates that workers acquiesced in their subordination to a greater degree in Shanghai than in St Petersburg, and this and other differences are traced back to historical and cultural context. In conclusion, the implications of contextual differences are explored in order to suggest why the intelligentsia in the People's Republic of China (PRC) attracted greater odium from the party-state than its counterpart in the Soviet Union.

‘A Plague of Salaried Marxists’: Sexuality and Subsistence in the Revolutionary Imaginary of Concha Michel

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 980-998 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jocelyn Olcott
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Sexual Exploitation ◽  
Social Economy ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Indigenous Cultures ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
Party Line

This article examines work of Mexican singer and activist Concha Michel, particularly the pamphlet Marxistas y ‘marxistas’ that sealed her expulsion from the Mexican Communist Party (Partido Comunista de México, PCM). Michel wrote the pamphlet after her return from the Soviet Union, where her experiences only confirmed her belief that revolutionary governments in Mexico and the Soviet Union alike had failed to attend to the massive amounts of social and cultural labor performed overwhelmingly by women. In particular, Communists' emphasis on modernization and scientific theory privileged the ‘social economy’ of commodified production and devalued what she dubbed the ‘natural economy’ of subsistence, reproduction, and artistic labors. The pamphlet draws parallels with the capitalist exploitation of laborers and the sexual exploitation of women perpetrated even by Communist Party leaders. Michel’s refusal to submit to the Party line resulted in her high-profile expulsion from the party, a fate that befell much of her social circle. Over subsequent decades, however, her commitment to activism on behalf of women, celebration of Mexico’s indigenous cultures, and persistent critique of the elision of subsistence labors would earn her celebrity among Mexican maternalist feminists.

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