This is a book of sociology written in a country that had spent nearly forty years insisting sociology did not exist. Under Stalin the word itself was an accusation: sociology was a "bourgeois pseudo-science," a Western fraud dressed up as neutral inquiry, and the men who had practised it in the 1920s were scattered, silenced or shot. Historical materialism, it was held, already contained everything a science of society could contain; to want more was to doubt the sufficiency of Marxism-Leninism, which was to doubt the Party. What you are holding is one of the first English-language monuments to the reversal of that verdict — the moment, in the decade after the Twentieth Congress, when a discipline that had been abolished was quietly readmitted. Gennady Osipov (1929–2021) was one of the two or three men who did the readmitting. He helped found, in 1968, the Soviet Sociological Association's first real research institute, and for the next half-century he was the discipline's institutional face. That makes this small volume more interesting than its dutiful prose suggests. It is the sound of a science being smuggled back into a state that had banned it, and the terms of the smuggling are the whole story.
The English text is Progress Publishers' of 1969, translated by David Myshne and edited by Jim Riordan, and for once the date on the spine is close to the date of the thought. The bibliography runs current to 1969 — its latest Soviet entry is D. Chesnokov's Historical Materialism, Moscow, that year — and the internal evidence points to no earlier Russian edition lurking behind it. This is a book of the late Thaw, published in English in the year after Soviet tanks entered Prague to shut down a movement that had promised, among other things, to let its citizens describe their own society. That coincidence is not incidental to what the book can and cannot say. The reformers of the Prague Spring had wanted, precisely, a sociology: instruments to measure the distance between the regime's self-image and the lives of the people it ruled. In August 1968 the Warsaw Pact answered the question of how much of that a bureaucratic state could tolerate. Osipov's book, appearing in the wake of that answer, is a study in exactly how much: which social objects a Soviet sociology was licensed to examine, and which it was not.
Who commissioned it, and for whom? The apparatus of the volume answers plainly. Roughly the first half, "Marxist Sociology," lays out a positive doctrine; the second half, "Marxist and Bourgeois Sociology Today," is a chapter-by-chapter critique of Western — overwhelmingly American — social science: Talcott Parsons, Pitirim Sorokin, W. W. Rostow, the theories of "social stratification," "social mobility" and the "elite." This is an export book, aimed at a Western readership and at the Communist parties of the West, and its purpose is to show that Soviet Marxism had a modern, rigorous, professionally literate answer to the sociology taught in London and New York. The tell is in the Author's Note, which sets the terms before a single argument is made: "Imperialism uses sociology as one of its most refined means of influencing the masses ideologically." Sociology, in other words, is a weapon in the Cold War of ideas, and this book is a counter-weapon. The concession that sociology is nonetheless a real science — one the USSR must now possess — is the thing being fought for inside that frame.
Osipov's central theoretical move is to install empirical sociology beneath historical materialism, as a licensed subordinate. Historical materialism is "the general sociological theory"; it supplies the laws. Concrete sociology supplies only the particulars — what he calls "applied (specific) sociology (or specific social studies)." The relationship is hierarchical and one-directional: "Philosophy provides sociology with a scientific theory of social development... Sociology furnishes particular material for philosophical generalisations, and sets problems to philosophy which... sociology by itself is unable to resolve." The general truths are known in advance. Fieldwork may fill in the texture, may optimise, may fine-tune "socio-economic models for the purpose of optimum control of society," but it may not touch the frame. This is the price of readmission, and Osipov pays it on every page: sociology is allowed back into the house on condition that it never contradict the householder.
Within those limits the critique of Western sociology is often shrewd, and a serious reader should say so. Osipov has read his opponents — Parsons, Sorokin, Robert Merton, Paul Lazarsfeld are quoted from the sources, not from digests — and his best pages land real blows. His objection to the "value-neutrality" of American empiricism is the standard sociology-of-knowledge point, but it is made with force: he cites C. Wright Mills, Gunnar Myrdal and Ralf Dahrendorf, sociologists of the West themselves, to the effect that a sociology claiming to float above politics tends in practice to serve "an interest in maintaining the status quo." His demolition of Rostow's Stages of Economic Growth — the "non-communist manifesto" that dissolved capitalism and socialism alike into a single "industrial society" governed by managers and technicians — is brisk and mostly right. And his handling of the "elite" theorists (Mosca, Michels, Pareto) correctly identifies their sleight of hand: the conversion of "historically determined class distinctions" into "natural differences," an "eternal law of nature" by which the clever are destined to rule the many.
But now watch what the same equipment does when it is turned toward the theory of "social stratification," and hold the result in your mind, because it is the hinge of the whole book. Stratification theory, Osipov complains, replaces the Marxist category of class — defined by relation to the means of production — with a scale of "higher and lower strata." He quotes Sorokin's definition disapprovingly: stratification means "the existence of higher and lower strata. Its basis and true essence consist in an unequal distribution of rights and privileges, duty and responsibility, social riches and scantiness, social power and influence among the members of society." He quotes Merrill's still sharper formula, that stratification is "a system of institutionalised social inequality that perpetuates privilege from generation to generation." His verdict is that these theorists describe "a pyramid of social inequality" while carefully declining to look at its foundation — that they map ranks and statuses "without considering the very base of the pyramid — sacrosanct private property."
The objection is not stupid. Where there is private property in the means of production, an account of inequality that stops at "status" and never reaches ownership is indeed evasive. But notice what the objection assumes, and what it therefore forecloses. It works only against societies with private property. Abolish private ownership — as the USSR claimed to have done — and by Osipov's own logic the pyramid should have no base, the strata should vanish, and the very vocabulary of "an unequal distribution of rights and privileges... social power and influence" should have nothing left to describe. Which is exactly the conclusion the book draws. The instruments most capable of measuring a bureaucratic ruling stratum — stratification analysis, elite theory, the study of the distribution of power and income independent of formal property titles — are precisely the instruments Osipov must destroy, because they are the only ones that could be trained on his own society and find something there.
Every discipline can be characterised by the questions it forbids as much as by the ones it pursues. Osipov's sociology is unusually explicit about its forbidden zone, and it draws the boundary in doctrine rather than in method. Under socialism, he writes, the social groups that remain — workers and engineering staff, town and country, mental and physical labour — are real, but they are of a wholly different character from classes: one must "remember the specific nature of the social groups in socialist society, namely, their friendly character and the gradual elimination of intergroup and intragroup differences." Antagonism is definitionally absent. The law of development that under capitalism produces class struggle produces, under socialism, only the "abolition of class differences." And the closure is sealed with a sentence that should be read very slowly, because on it the entire question of the Soviet ruling stratum turns: under socialism, Osipov writes, "there are no classes which for mercenary interests want to retain the old production relations."
That is the finding. Not a distortion of one date or one episode, but a structural prohibition written into the definition of the science. A Soviet sociologist could study almost anything about the daily texture of Soviet life — and could do so with genuine rigour — provided the study assumed in advance that no group in the society had a material interest in the society staying as it was. The privileges of the nomenklatura; the real distribution of income and power; the gap between the wage of a ministry official and the wage of a collective farmer; the mechanisms by which position was inherited and access rationed — these were not merely unstudied. They were, by the book's own terms, unstudiable, because to study them would have required the concepts of stratum, elite and privilege that the book had spent its second half proving to be bourgeois frauds. The discipline of measuring society was licensed on condition that it never measure its own ruling caste.
There is one moment when the forbidden question surfaces inside the book, and it is worth marking because of who raises it. Refuting Parsons's claim that modern capitalism can no longer be described as a two-class society, Osipov reproduces Parsons's own sentence: modern Western capitalism "cannot be painted in Marxist colours as a two-class society, just as Soviet society cannot be termed a one-class society." Parsons, that is, tosses off in passing the very proposition Osipov's whole apparatus exists to deny — that the USSR too has an internal structure of rulers and ruled. Osipov quotes it only to bat it aside as one more piece of "elite pluralism" unfit for analysis. But the sentence is now in the book, printed in Moscow, and a Soviet reader in 1969 could not un-read it. The one place a Soviet sociology of the Soviet ruling stratum appears in these pages, it appears in the mouth of an American conservative, and is dismissed unexamined.
Osipov himself half-knew the history that had produced this silence. In one candid passage — the most honest in the volume — he writes that the "'abstraction' of individuals from practice, characteristic of some people at a certain period in Soviet history, made it impossible to form an objective picture of the life of the whole social organism," and "inevitably led to dogmatism in certain formulas." "A certain period in Soviet history" is the Stalin decades; "dogmatism" is the abolition of his own discipline; "the abstraction of individuals from practice" is the refusal to look at how people actually lived. He is describing, in the muffled idiom the times required, exactly why the book in your hands had to be written — and, without seeming to notice, exactly why it could not finish the job.
The book's tragedy is that the sociology it forbids had already been written, three decades before, by a man the Soviet state had murdered. Leon Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed, completed in 1936, is precisely an empirical sociology of the Soviet ruling stratum — the study Osipov's method rules out of existence — and it is instructive to set the two side by side, because Trotsky's problem was Osipov's problem exactly reversed. Osipov had every research instrument and was forbidden the object. Trotsky had the object and almost no instruments: he was in exile, cut off from the archives, working from the Soviet press. What he does with that press is a lesson in method. Denied the ability to survey the bureaucracy, he reads its own official complaints as data: "Since it is at least not hostile to itself, its official self-accusations, evoked always by some sort of urgent practical demand, deserve a great deal more confidence than its more frequent and noisy self-praise." From that principle he assembles the picture Osipov's science may not draw — the 1935 housing plan fulfilled to "only 55.7 per cent" while officials complain their new flats lack "rooms for houseworkers"; the ten-million-ruble "palaces"; the limousines promised to delegates; and behind it all the conclusion that "Soviet society is already divided into a secure and privileged minority, and a majority getting along in want" ("The Growth of Inequality," ch. 6).
Most pointed of all, for a reader of Osipov, is Trotsky's chapter on the Soviet census. The state was preparing to count its population in January 1937, and Trotsky examined the list of social categories the census-takers were to use — worker, clerical worker, collective farmer, minister of religion, and so on. The official commentary explained that no finer categories were needed "because there are no classes in the Soviet Union." Trotsky's verdict: the list "is constructed with the direct intention of concealing the privileged upper strata, and the more deprived lower depths" ("Social Relations in the Soviet Union," ch. 9). Here is the whole matter in one image. Osipov, thirty-three years later, would defend a sociology that categorises Soviet society into "friendly" groups and forbids the concept of a privileged stratum. Trotsky had already shown that this was not a scientific finding but a design decision — that the categories were built to make the ruling stratum invisible. And the sequel is grim confirmation: the 1937 census was suppressed when its returns proved inconvenient, and the statisticians who conducted it were arrested and several shot. That is what happened, in the same decade, to the last Soviet professionals who tried to count their own society without permission. Osipov's caution is not cowardice; it is memory.
Trotsky's positive account is the one the book cannot reach: the bureaucracy is not a class, for "it has neither stocks nor bonds" and "cannot transmit to his heirs his rights in the exploitation of the state apparatus," yet "it pretends that as a special social group it does not even exist" — and it is nonetheless "in the full sense of the word the sole privileged and commanding stratum in the Soviet society" (ch. 9). Whether one accepts Trotsky's specific conclusion — the USSR as a degenerated workers' state, the bureaucracy as a parasitic caste rather than a new ruling class — is a question the reader may leave open; it was contested on the anti-Stalinist left itself. What is not open to question is that Trotsky was doing sociology — counting, classifying, tracing the distribution of income and power through a real population — on the one object Osipov's science was built to exclude. The earlier Left Oppositionist Christian Rakovsky had opened the same inquiry in 1928, in his essay on the "professional dangers of power," analysing how a stratum of functionaries acquires interests distinct from those it claims to serve. This is the tradition of the social science of bureaucratic rule, and it long predates the discipline Osipov was reviving. Its findings are the ones his method was designed never to produce.
None of this is a reason to dismiss the book, and a reader told to dismiss it would learn nothing. Two things in it are genuinely valuable, and the first is the courage of the enterprise. Re-founding a banned science is not a small act in a state that had shot its previous practitioners, and Osipov's insistence that Soviet Marxism needed empirical investigation — that it was not enough to recite the general laws, that one had to go and look — was, in 1969, a real and slightly dangerous claim. His argument that "scientific sociology only became possible when the dialectical materialist method had been extended to social life" is doctrinally orthodox; but the practical corollary he draws from it — that sociologists must actually study "the individual's place in society, his needs and the extent to which these needs are satisfied" — was an opening, however narrow, toward looking at the country as it was.
The second is the concrete research the book reports, which is better than its theory. Where Osipov describes actual Soviet fieldwork he is worth reading. He cites a Leningrad study of young workers finding that "young people with a good general education are often allocated facile operations, and this causes job dissatisfaction" — a small, honest, checkable finding of the kind the discipline exists to produce, and one that quietly registers a friction the official ideology denied. He describes studies of juvenile employment that traced youth unemployment not to individual failing but to "defects in the functioning of the social mechanism as a whole." He is clear-eyed about method: questionnaires, interviews and surveys, statistical and mathematical techniques, the construction of testable models. And in one sentence he states, better than he knows, the exact predicament of his own book: sociology, he writes, has the tools "capable of solving many problems," but "it is the ideology, the world outlook of the society and its leaders that determines how these problems are resolved." He wrote that about Western sociology. It is the truest thing in the volume about Soviet sociology, and about the ceiling over his own head.
Osipov's later career bore out both the promise and the limit. He remained the Soviet — then Russian — discipline's leading institution-builder to the end of his life, an academician, the founder of institutes. The empirical sociology he helped smuggle back in outlived the state that had licensed it, and when the archives finally opened after 1991 the questions his method had forbidden — the size and privileges of the nomenklatura, the real distribution of Soviet income and power — turned out to be answerable after all, and were answered, sometimes by his own successors. Read this book, then, for what it is: the founding charter of a real discipline, drawn up under a censorship it half-acknowledges, by a serious man who knew how to study a society and was permitted to study every society but his own. Set it beside The Revolution Betrayed, and you have the two halves of a science that could not, in 1969, be assembled in one country: the method here, and — thirty-three years earlier, from a murdered exile reading the Soviet newspapers — the case it was never allowed to be used on.