The Thinking Reed

Soviet sociologists appealed to the writings of Lenin, and it was with the study of Lenin’s works that these sciences began their development here. One may laugh as much as one likes at this ‘quotation-digging’, but without it no sociological research would have been possible in the USSR. Lenin included in his articles a great number of valuable ideas which made even the first Soviet sociological writings extremely interesting. Burlatsky tried to counterpose modern sociological science to the schemas of the official textbooks, but without engaging in a direct polemic with the official dogmas. He drew attention to the absence in the Soviet Union of any serious works on the political life of our own country:

It must be said that there exists an immense amount of information describing the political process, accumulated in state, Party and other organizations, which has hardly yet been generalized and studied. Groups of sociologists working in some committees, ministries and departments are only beginning to get to work. But they, too, hardly concern themselves with the political aspect of the work of these organizations.12

He tried in his own writings to formulate in a more or less clear-cut way the ideas of rationalizing the system and introducing liberal reforms. In particular he spoke up for democracy at the point of production, urging study of various forms of worker participation in the management of enterprises, and ‘publicity for the most effective of these’.13 He also recalled Lenin’s saying that the Soviet trade unions must wage ‘economic struggle’ against the bureaucratic apparatus, ‘safeguarding the working people’s material and spiritual interests in ways and means inaccessible to this apparatus’.14 In his books we find sharp criticism of the bureaucracy, based on the ideas of the young Marx and having much in common with the ideas of E. Gnedin:

As Marx observed long ago, it is always a characteristic of bureaucracy that it identifies the processes of society and even those of the class whose interests it represents with its own specific interests and that it tries to ignore society’s requirements. As the functions and scope of action of the bureaucratic apparatus expand, so these tendencies become all-embracing. The danger of bureaucratic dictatorship arises: there appears and becomes dominant a striving to break free from all control. The bureaucratic apparatus retires into itself, so to speak, and begins to develop according to its own laws. And, correspondingly, the bureaucratic caste becomes exclusive.

From this Burlatsky concludes:

The basic evil in the inflation of the bureaucratic apparatus is not that it is very expensive to maintain, even though that is also hard to put up with. The worst aspect lies elsewhere. Being constructed on purely official-hierarchical principles, the bureaucratic mechanism soon ceases to perform the social functions for which it was actually created.15