Ovsei Shkaratan and the Soviet Social Structure after Stalin

Abstract

Ovsei Shkaratan and the Soviet Social Structure after Stalin James Allen Nealy Jr. (bio) Intellectual history features prominently in the contemporary historiography of imperial and Soviet Russia. Although to date much of this literature has focused on the late 19th and early 20th centuries, scholars interested in intellectual developments in the Soviet Union have recently turned their attention to later decades.1 Perhaps inevitably, this transition has led to a convergence with the rich body of scholarship that interprets Soviet history in a [End Page 77] transnational or global context.2 One important consequence of this conjunction has been the number of works that analyze the relationship between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), intellectuals, and the West. Slava Gerovitch shows that scholars working in the interdisciplinary—and American-born—field of cybernetics developed a technocratic discourse that transcended party orthodoxy while nonetheless supporting the Party's ambitions.3 Petr Cherkasov posits that Soviet scholars tasked with analyzing the capitalist world were afforded sufficient intellectual freedom to dispute party platitudes.4 Benjamin Nathans argues that reform-minded intellectuals combined insights drawn from Western philosophers with cybernetic methods to challenge the Soviet system to live up to its own juridical decrees.5 Aleksandr Bikbov traces how political and sociological categories—at least some of them imported from Western scholarship—played important social functions in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet periods.6 Finally, Sergei Zhuk demonstrates how some Soviet historians of the United States unwittingly served as conduits for American values.7 This article builds on this literature by considering how the Soviet social structure was analyzed in the scholarship of Ovsei Irmovich Shkaratan (1931–2019), a Soviet historian-cum-sociologist whose work first rose to prominence during the de-Stalinization period.8 First, the article situates Shkaratan in his political and institutional context. This discussion explains the preconditions for Shkaratan's work and intellectual evolution. Next, it demonstrates that, during the post-Stalin reemergence of sociological science, Shkaratan drew on Western scholarship to develop "middle-range" theories to posit a functionalist interpretation of the Soviet working class that challenged, but did [End Page 78] not displace, traditional visions of the Soviet social structure.9 A discussion of Shkaratan's first two monographs, published respectively in 1970 and 1973, shows how field research allowed Shkaratan to develop a composite definition of class that incorporated objective, subjective, and spatial variables. A final section considers whether sociologists influenced Soviet socioeconomic management. It argues in the affirmative. The timeframe under consideration in this article (1962–73) roughly corresponds with the first decade of the rule of CPSU leader Leonid Brezhnev (1964–82). It was once commonplace for scholars to understand this period as an era of "stagnation" of socioeconomic and cultural evolution.10 Although this remains the case for those operating within the "totalitarian" or "neototalitarian" schools of Soviet studies, in recent years some—most significantly, Anna Krylova—have challenged this perception and instead stressed the persistence of change in Soviet history.11 Careful interrogation of the scholarship of Soviet intellectuals charged with studying Soviet society during [End Page 79] the 1960s and 1970s buttresses the latter position. This article demonstrates that Soviet social scientists like Ovsei Shkaratan saw the Soviet social structure as neither "stagnant" nor uniform but rather as a dynamic formation rife with inequality. ________ Ovsei Shkaratan's intellectual trajectory was made possible by the political changes that occurred in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death in 1953. Although typically celebrated in the Anglophone world for its denunciation of Stalin-era repression, Nikita Khrushchev's address at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, which encouraged scholarly reorientation toward a focus on the "people as the creator of history" as well as the correction of "erroneous views … in the spheres of history, philosophy, economy, and of other sciences," also marks a crucial moment in the evolution of knowledge production in the Soviet Union.12 In fact, intellectuals had begun to pursue the goals Khrushchev articulated even before the congress. In 1954, Kommunist published an article that chastised the humanities and social sciences for failing to address social issues.13 The following year in the pages of Voprosy filosofii...