From «Revolution» to «Transformations» and «Changes»? Development of Discourses of Analysis Qualitative Social Change

Abstract

The popular condemnation of «revolutionaryism» in post-Soviet Russia is seen as contradicting the global trends in scientific analysis of the role of revolutions in the development of society, according to which it is the revolutionary institutional changes that are most important for social progress. These ideas were first comprehensively expressed by the founders of Marxism, and in the twentieth century. in Western sociological thought «completed», on the one hand, with the theories of the scientific and technological revolution, on the other hand, with the concepts of the sociology of revolution. The desire of Russian social scientists to overcome the legacy of Soviet «forced Marxism» led to a conscious alienation from the post-Marxist sociology of revolution. In Russian scientific discourse in the 1990s–2000s. there was a displacement of the discussion of revolutionary changes by using less specific concepts of «social transformation» and «change», and in the 2010s. it joined with the government’s policy of a fundamental rejection of any revolutionary changes. As a result, Russian sociologists lose the ability to distinguish between revolutionary and evolutionary shifts in the development of Russian society, focusing mainly on their traumatic nature.