After 1968, the decline of real socialism left little place for the methodological development of Marxism itself in unofficial Soviet thought – in contrast to the neo-Marxian turn in Western social and cultural theory of the time. This divergence is especially significant in that it effected the formation of two incompatible views of Bakhtin during the 1980s and 1990s: one of these, rooted in Slavonic philology, saw Bakhtin as the implicit heir of Russian-Orthodox sobornost’ and Solov’ev’s idealism, while the other view, emerging from the post-Soviet humanities, understood him as a close collocutor of Luka´cs, Gramsci, Althusser and E. P. Thompson in the development of the Marxist theory of ideology and superstructure for cultural studies. During the 1970s, however, Mikhail Lifschitz and Ewald Il’enkov remained faithful to the ideals of authentic Marxism and high realism and enlighted rationalism in the spirit of the 1930s. Despite their prestige in semi-official and unofficial circles, they remained nearly completely isolated, tragically and consciously out-of-time ( Jones 1994). (This position could be compared to the final divergence of Lukacs with his students from the so-called Budapest School.)
The intellectual biography of Yuri Davydov, the most prominent Soviet historian of sociology, is highly symptomatic for the changes that were taking place at the time. Setting out from an enthusiastic fascination with the young Marx, following Il’enkov, Davydov had already moved to a consciously neo-conservative position (in the Western sense) by the late 1960s, becoming one of the chief critics of the neo-Marxism of the Frankfurt School. From the second half of the 1980s onward, he began to make attempts at combining the development of the theoretical heritage of Max Weber with the ideological horizon of the authors of the Vekhi-group, primarily of Sergey Bulgakov (Davydov and Gaidenko 1995). In this sense, one might say that the philosopher Vladimir Bibler and the historian Mikhail Gefter were far truer to the spirit of the Soviet post-Stalinist renaissance of ‘real Marxism’. During the second half of the 1960s, both worked in the innovative Sector of the Methodology of History at the Historical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (Markwick 2001). Turning to Bakhtin (but not to Habermas!) and to Marx’s division of ‘joint’ and ‘universal’ labour, Bibler was able to develop a general theory of the contemporary transformation of scientific rationality into pluralistic rationality, becoming a ‘logic of culture’ (Bibler left behind an entire school of talented researchers and teachers). Gefter, by contrast, developed ideas on the plurality and the systemic interrelation of historical worlds, multi-temporality, and the alterity and subjectivity of contemporary history. In part, his ideas were similar to the philosophies of history propounded by Ernst Bloch or Sigfried Krakauer. References to Gefter can be found in the majority of contemporary domestic theories of the historical development of Russia (Vichnevski 2000).
The main theoretical problem of Soviet sociology soon became its delimitation from historical materialism (Weinberg 1974). In the final analysis, the 1970s affirmed – with implicit references to the ideas of Merton – three theoretical levels: while historical materialism was afforded the highest, philosophical ground, the realm of sociology did not only cover the lowest, empirical level but also broke into an ‘intermediate’ space of theoretization. Largely concentrated on surveys, quantitative indices and mathematical methods, this sociology soon moved towards major American theoretical literature and the collaboration with social psychology as its main point of reference. In this situation, it becomes clear why Talcott Parsons – and not the loquacious Pitirim Sorokin or the nuanced Robert Merton – was actually ‘the main Soviet sociologist’, as a recent joke tells us: Parson’s theory of self-sustaining social systems with a matching collection of values, needs and motivations corresponded quite well to the demands of the stable society of the Brezhnev era. Towards the late 1960s, it was Yuri Levada who proposed the most refined version of theoretical sociology based on the theoretical groundwork laid by Parsons. However, his work was immediately subject to staunch ideological attacks for the absence of any class approach and for its tendency to usurp the methodological functions of historical materialism (Shlapentokh 1987). Nevertheless, Levada’s colleagues and collaborators from the 1970s – such as Boris Dubin, Leo Gudkov and Leonid Sedov – remain the most important analysts and theorists of the processes of posttotalitarian transformation to this day, especially insofar as the sociology of culture and literature are concerned.
'Handbook of Contemporary European Social Theory', Gerard Delanty ed., Routledge 2006
for Jurij Davydov, 1929-2007
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