The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

The year was 1968, and the fact that thirty-eight-year-old Levada called himself a sociologist, and his subject sociology, was almost revolutionary. Sociology was not exactly banned in the Soviet Union, but the name of the discipline had been reduced to something like a curse word. Lenin himself had inaugurated it as a Soviet insult. The problem with sociology was much the same as with psychoanalysis: the field of study refused to be a "science" that could be used to create a new society of new men. A year before the Philosophers' Ship sailed, one of Lenin's closest allies, Nikolai Bukharin, published The Theory of Historical Materialism, an attempt at a sort of Marxist textbook of everything, written in a folksy language intended for the proletariat. Three things that Bukharin did in this textbook proved deadly for Soviet sociology: he included new ideas that he believed advanced Marxist theory, he subtitled it A Popular Textbook of Marxist Sociology, and he proclaimed the supreme importance of sociology among the social sciences because it "examines not some one aspect of public life but all of public life in all its complexity."²¹ Lenin hated the book, and the word "sociology" took the brunt of his rage. He underlined it throughout the book and supplied a small variety of comments in the margins: "Haha!" "Eclectic!" "Help!" and the like.²² In another eight years, when Bukharin was deposed in a Party power struggle, Stalin recalled Lenin's skepticism by describing Bukharin's work as possessed of "the hypertrophied pretentiousness of a half-baked theoretician."²³ Bukharin was eventually executed. Much earlier, sociology had had to go into hiding.

A cautious excavation began after the Second World War. The Institute of Philosophy in the Soviet Academy of Sciences was allowed to acknowledge the existence of a discipline called "sociology." The primary context in which the word appeared was criticism of Western sociological theories, which provided scholars with an excuse for studying them.²⁴ The Soviet academics took care not to call their own work "sociology": in 1968, a unit within the Academy of Sciences was allowed to graduate to being an institute, but it would be called the Institute for Concrete Social Studies. Levada, who had been trained as a philosopher, would head up the theory department of the new structure.

The Politburo resolution establishing the Institute for Concrete Social Studies was marked "top secret," as was a later document outlining the new institute's scope of work.²⁵ The secrecy, along with the institute's name—"social" instead of "sociological"—suggested that the Politburo thought it was stepping into sensitive and even dangerous territory. The potential benefits, however, outweighed the risks. The new structure was charged not only with criticizing bourgeois theory but also with studying Soviet society. The Central Committee itself was to approve studies and to receive their results. It was 1968, the year of the Prague Spring, when the Czechoslovak Communist Party attempted to split off from the Soviet Union and pursue its own, comparatively liberalized version of socialism. The Politburo was worried about similar ideas circulating in the Soviet Union. Indeed, in the summer, after Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, eight extraordinarily brave people staged a protest in Red Square; all were arrested. The following year, Amalrik would write his essay asking if the Soviet Union would last until 1984. The Politburo wanted to know the answer to that question too, and it ordered the Institute for Concrete Social Studies to be fully staffed, with 250 researchers, by 1971. Of course, there were no trained sociologists in the Soviet Union, so the new institute received special dispensation to hire researchers without advanced degrees. Levada was one of a handful of Soviet citizens who had trained themselves in sociology. He had graduated from Moscow State University with a degree in philosophy, studied sociology theory that he had found in spetskhran, and had then gone to Communist China to do research there: the system was always more tolerant of inquiry directed at other societies. Now Levada was virtually legitimized as a sociologist, and he was lecturing in the journalism department.