Susan Gross Solomon

From its very beginnings Western scholarly writing on Soviet science has been largely contextual in orientation, with particular attention given to the institutional and political setting of science in Russian and Soviet history. This book moves that tradition in a new direction by focusing more closely on the social conditions of the research proc

From its very beginnings Western scholarly writing on Soviet science has been largely contextual in orientation, with particular attention given to the institutional and political setting of science in Russian and Soviet history.

The first decade of Soviet cultural life was marked by a pluralism unmatched in the subsequent history of the USSR. In many fields of art and science, Party and non-Party "proletarian" and "bourgeois" intellectuals worked side by side, vigorously debating questions of substance and method. In this first major study of a Soviet field of social science in the post-Revolution period, Dr. Solomon examines the controversy that divided social scientists studying the economy and society of the Soviet peasant during the 1920s. The intellectual disagreements in post-Revolution Soviet rural studies were exacerbated by social, political, and professional differences among the contending scholars. The infighting between the groups was bitter. Yet in contrast to recent studies of other Soviet professions in the 1920s, the author finds that in rural studies Marxists and non-Marxists had much in common. Her findings suggest that the coexistence of the "old" and the "new" in Soviet rural studies might have lasted for some time had not external political forces intervened in late 1928, acting as a pressure on the field and eventually causing its demise.

The first decade of Soviet cultural life was marked by a pluralism unmatched in the subsequent history of the USSR. In many fields of art and science, Party and non-Party "proletarian" and "bourgeois" intellectuals worked side by side, vigorously debating questions of substance and method. In this first major study of a Soviet field of social science in the post-Revolution period, Dr. Solomon examines the controversy that divided social scientists studying the economy and society of the Soviet peasant during the 1920s. The intellectual disagreements in post-Revolution Soviet rural studies were exacerbated by social, political, and professional differences among the contending scholars. The infighting between the groups was bitter. Yet in contrast to recent studies of other Soviet professions in the 1920s, the author finds that in rural studies Marxists and non-Marxists had much in common. Her findings suggest that the coexistence of the "old" and the "new" in Soviet rural studies might have lasted for some time had not external political forces intervened in late 1928, acting as a pressure on the field and eventually causing its demise.

This volume - a product of the Soviet Domestic Politics workshop sponsored by the Social Science Research Council - marks an end and a new beginning. The end, of course, is that of Sovietology, now permanently "overtaken by events". The beginning encompasses not only a radical multiplication of subjects for analysis - the post-Soviet states - but also the arrival of a new generation of scholars entering the field at its turning point. As the essays in this collection demonstrate, they bring fresh contemporary social scientific questions and methods to an unprecedentedly accessible universe of diverse social groups and societies once subsumed under the Soviet rubric. Their work enriches not only post-Soviet studies but the entire range of comparativist work in the social sciences. Among the authors included here are Jane Dawson, Ellen Hamilton, Joel Hellman, Mark Saroyan, Joseph Schull and Michael Smith.