SOCIAL STRATIFICATION AND SOCIOLOGY IN THE SOVIET UNION

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Approved For lease 2007/03/05: CIARDP83TOO f&ggOoI Q %Qre than a decade old in its revived empiri-
Social Stratification and - cal form, sociology in the communist world bears clear resemblance to
?
Sociology in the Soviet Unionw
Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard B. Dobson
THE revival of Soviet sociology in the post-Stalin era is indicative of
the changes in that society made possible by destalinization.
Academic sociology is not possible in a fully totalitarian society. Such
regimes as the Nazi, the Stalinist, and seemingly the Maoist, which
demand strict adherence to an official creed and tolerate not the slightest
opposition to the party line, dare not permit sociologists to shed light on
the distribution of wealth Ind privileges or to find out " kto kogo?"-
" who gets whom?" Although there is always a gap between social
reality and the ideological justification of a social order, in a totalitarian
system empirical facts may be much more damaging to the ideology,
since it is proclaimed as a sacred truth and all-encompassing explanation
of man's social life. It is feared that the sheer opportunity to analyse
social reality empirically will supply ammunition to the critics of the
existing order, to those who point to the discrepancy between what is
and what should be.
In the United States and other Western countries, sociology has been
a " critical discipline." In the heartland of modern sociology, the US,
its practitioners have documented almost ad nauseam the extent to
which American reality and the American creed of an egalitarian society
are at odds. Sociologists have emphasized the failings of the school
system in reducing the differences in ability and motivation among
children from families of varying income and cultural levels. They have
shown the limits of the efforts to curtail wealth or income differentials
through progressive tax policy. They have documented the punitive
consequences of low status on personality and health. With few excep-
tions, such writings have been cast in the context of criticism of the
society and various of its institutions for repressing opportunity and
inhibiting equality. American and other Western sociologists as a group
have been more supportive of " liberal " or " left " egalitarian politics
than those in any other field in academe.2
This paper is part of a comparative analysis of the social role of different categories
of intellectuals being conducted under grants from the Ford Foundation and the
National Endowment for the Humanities to the Center for International Affairs, Har-
vard University. We are also indebted to the Guggenheim Foundation and the Center
for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for Fellowships to Lipset during 1972-
73 and the International Research and Exchanges Board which awarded a dissertation
research fellowship to Dobson for 1972-73. For a broader treatment of some of
these issues, see S. M. Lipset and Richard B. Dobson, " The Intellectual as Critic
and Rebel: With Special Reference to the United States and the Soviet Union,"
Daedalus, 101 (Summer 1972), pp. 137-198.
S. M. Lipset and E. C. Ladd, Jr., "The Politics of American Sociologists," American
Journal of Sociology, 78 (1972), pp. 67-104.
the field in other countries both in its value orientations and in findings,
particularly in the area of social stratification.2 Thus, as a perusal of
the work of Eastern scholars makes evident, almost all their writings,
like those of American students of stratification, evince a positive concern
for a more egalitarian society. Accepting the communist goal of
equality, they document the existence of considerable inequality in
s terms of power, income, status, and opportunity within their country
and show its relation to family socio-economic background, sex, com-
munity of origin (metropolitan to rural), and less frequently to national
or ethnic background.
The Soviet sociologists differ from their American and other western
counterparts in assuming (at least publicly) that their society and govern-
mental regime is in a transitional stage which will lead increasingly and
inevitably to the achievable goal of real equality, i.e. communism, a
system without differentiated strata or variations in reward. Unlike
most western ,;rodents of stratification they do not attribute the persis-
tence of inequality in their country to the desire of the privileged to
maintain a superior position for themselves and their kin. Their data
are rarely presented as an explicit critique of some major aspect of the
society. And although quantitative comparisons with the results of com-
parable research in non-Soviet societies are rarely made, there are
frequent comments in Soviet academic journals that the research findings
2 Lipset has compared earlier Soviet research in stratification with Western work In S. M.
Lipset, " Social Mobility and Equal Opportunity," The Public Interest, No. 29 (Fall,
1972), pp. 90-108, and S. M. Lipset, " La mobility sociale et les objectifs socialistes,"
Sociologie et socldlds, 4 (November 1972), pp. 193-224. Questions of social mobility
were examined comparatively in S. M. Lipset and Reinhardt Bendix, Social Mobility
in Industrial Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959). Pioneering work
in the area of Soviet social stratification has been done by Alex Inkeles and Robert
Feldmesser. See, in particular, Alex Inkeles, " Social Stratification and Mobility in
the Soviet Union," in R. Bendix and S. M. Lipset (eds.), Class, Status, and Power,
2nd ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1966), pp. 516-26, and Alex Inkeles and Ray.
mond Bauer, The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959). More recent contributions include Zev
Katz, Hereditary Elements in Education and Social Structure in the USSR (Glasgow:
Institute of Soviet and East European Studies, University of Glasgow, 1969); David
Lane, The End of Inequality? Stratification Under State Socialism (Baltimore: Pen-
guin Books, 1971); Frank Parkin, Class Inequality and Political Order: Social Strati-
fication in Capitalist and Communist Societies (New York: Praeger, 1972); Zev Katz,
Patterns of Social Stratification in the USSR (Cambridge, Mass.: Center for Inter-
national Studies, M.I.T., 1972); Zev Katz, Patterns of Social Mobility in the USSR
(Cambridge, Mass.; Center for International Studies, M.I.T., 1972); and Mervyn Mat-
thews, Class and Society in Soviet Russia (New York: Walker & Co., 1972). The
authors wish to express their thanks to Dr Katz for his assistance in locating materials.
A valuable collection of recent Soviet writing in this area is the volume Social Strati-
fication and Mobility In the USSR, edited and translated by Murray Yanowitch and
Weseley Fisher, with an introduction by S. M. Lipset (White Plains, N.Y.: Inter-
national Arts and Sciences Press, 1973) (now in press). In the present article, the
authors have sought to refer the reader to pertinent translations from the Russian,
when such materials exist. Also noteworthy is the comparative study by Janina
Markiewicz-Lagneau, Education, egalite et socialisme: theorie et pratique de la diJ-
Jerenciation sociale en pays socialistes (Paris: Anthropos, 1969).
 REPRINTED FROM
DA3DALUS
]j ournal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
 12. Social Status and Inequality of Access
to Higher Education in the USSR
RICHARD B. DOBSON
Reprinted from Jerome Karabel and A. H. Halsey,
eds., PGS1ER AND IIEOLOGY IN EDUCATION (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 254-275-
Since Its Inception, the Soviet government
has committed itself to the democratization
of higher education. After coming to power,
the Bolshevik Party set out to use education
as a tool to reshape the social order-to
provide the necessary ideological tempering,
transmit the technical skills required for the
building of a modern Industrial economy,
and obliterate distinctions between social
groups and classes. Policies ensuring workers
and peasants access to the higher schools, in
particular, were designed to bring talent to
the top, to break the "ruling classes"'
monopoly of education, "culture," and
privilege, and to create a new "socialist intel.
ligentsia" devoted to the Soviet regimes
The drive to industrialize in the thirties
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coupled with a rapid expansion of the spe-
cialized secondary and higher educational
Institutions, made possible an extraordinary
degree of upward mobility. Access to higher
education was by no means afforded by
merit alone-social and political considera-
tions were no less important. Preparatory
programs called "workers' faculties" (rab-
faky) fed thousands of recruits from the
working class into the higher schools. The
graduates of the "proletarianized" vuzy
(higher educational btstitutions*) in turn
swelled the ranks of the intelligentsia' ,
?Yuz is an often used acronym for the Russian
vysshee uchebnoe zavedenfe, meaning "higher
educational Institution." Vuzy is the plural of vuz.
In the latter half of the thirties, pressure
to enroll great numbers of wnrkerg anti pens.
ants was relaxed. Restrictions on access to
higher education for "alien social elements"
were removed, and academic standards were
raised. By 1936, achievement tests were In-
stituted in order to allow the selection of the
best qualified. The proportion of students
classified as "workers" or "peasants" de.
clined from 72 percent In 1932 to 56 per-
cent in 1938. From that year until recently,
figures on the social composition of students
in higher education were not published. It Is
,.--ary likely that working-class and peasantry
representation declined further in subse-
quent years as a result of other changes. Not
only were the workers' faculties phased out,
but modest tuition fees were Introduced in
1940 (and continued until 1956) for stu.
dents in the upper grades of the secondary
school and in vuzy.3
In the course of the thirties, while crush-
ing real and imagined opposition within the
society, the Stalinist dictatorship was con-
centrating in its hands information on politi-
cal and social matters. In 1936, "pedol-
ogy"-the social-psychological study of the
learning process-was authoritatively de-
nounced as a "bourgeois" pseudo-science
and was suppressed.? Independent research
by social scientiws was ruled out; valuable
studies of the factors affecting educational
performance which had begun in the
twenties ceased. The question of the extent
to which differences in status affected
educational opportunity, occupational at-
tainment, and the distribution of rewards in
society became shrouded In official secrecy.
Certainly no Soviet sociological research ex-
plored this problem.s
The issue of how privilege may be trans-
mitted through the educational system was
revived In the late fifties. Expressing both
practical and ideological concerns, Premier
Khrushchev spoke bluntly about the short-
comings of the educational system which
was to serve the building of communism. As
more and more young people went on not
only to complete the mandatory seven years
This article appears here for the first time. Copyright ? 1977 by Richard B. Dobson.
Annrr wart Fnr RPIPasP 2007/0310.5. f;IA-RIP iT00G6i6R000100060030-
255
of schooling, but to graduate from second-
ary schnnl n-t every grathnate n- u lri rnnnt
on getting a higher education. The secondary
school, which traditionally served as a
springboard to higher education, was said to
foster a disdainful attitude toward manual
work. It was "divorced from life"--at vari-
ance both with the economy's needs for
skilled workers and with the values of the
new communist man.
Access to higher education had become
restricted for those of lower status. Khrush-
chev disclosed that only 30 to 40 percent of
the students in Moscow's higher educational
institutions came from working-class or col-
lective-farm families, although th ter
comprised the great bulk of the popu n. 6
Sometimes, he asserted, admittance to vuzy
was the result less of the student's motiva-
tion and ability than of "a competition of
parents" who would not only push their
children along the path toward a high-status
position, but who, by influencing or even
bribing admissions officials, would pave their
way.,
The antedote for these social His.' In
Khrushchev's view, was a solid dose of labor
training In secondary school, followed by
practical work "In production." Regulations
governing admission to vuzy were to be
changed, as well. Recommendations of
Party, Komsomol, and union organizations
were to weigh more heavily, and "produc-
tion candidates" (those with a sec zry
education who had worked for at lejvo
years) were to comprise up to four-fifths of
the entering classes. In this way. youth
would be taught to respect labor, and the
work period would weed out the less moti-
vated and less able and thus equalize to some
degree working-class and intelligentsia
youth's chances for higher education.a
The sweeping reforms carried out at the
end of the fifties gave rise to additional
problems. Although pupils learned trades in
secondary school, and most vuz students
acquired work experience, they regarded
work in a factory, shop, or farm as an un-
fortunate detour from their train objec-
 proved For Release 2007/03/05: CIA-RDPKT00966R400100060030-2
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