Justification Practices of Soviet Sociology Uniqueness in the Late- and Post-Soviet Doctoral Dissertations of Two Academies

Soviet sociology and the system of doctoral education as a whole were heavily permeated by ideology. During perestroika, a course toward general liberalization was taken. In 1988, sociology was officially included in the list of scientific specializations of the Higher Attestation Commission (HAC) as an independent discipline. Nevertheless, there were several ideological practices that needed to be formally included in dissertations such as references to Marxism-Leninism, Lenin, or even critiques of Western theories. This paper focuses on such practices based on summaries of 152 doctoral dissertations defended in 1988-1998. The summaries are divided into two groups: a) 99 summaries of late-Soviet doctoral dissertations in philosophy and sociology defended at the Academy of Social Sciences (AoSS) and the Institute for Sociology (IS) in USSR’s final years (1988-1991); b) 53 summaries of post-Soviet dissertations in sociology defended at the same institutions in 1992-1998 after their restructuring. Comparative analysis will allow us to underline the presence of ideological practices in Soviet academic writing and their consequent influence on post-Soviet dissertations based on the work done in two scientific organizations: IS as supposedly more liberal and AoSS as more conservative. The analysis is based on quantitative and qualitative content analysis methods, i.e. on the comparison of objective and subjective criteria in dissertation summaries as ideological practices meant to justify the uniqueness of Soviet (after 1991 – Russian) sociology and/or society.