Putin’s War in Ukraine Forcing Russia’s Sociologists to Redefine Their Field in the Ways Sorokin Did after 1917, Yasaveyev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 5 – Putin’s war in Ukraine is forcing sociologists in the Russian Federation to again redefine their focus, Iskander Yasaveyev says. Up until February 2022, “we studied a society in peace in the context of globalization” but “from now on our subject, if we continue to study Russia must be on a society in a state of war and growing isolation.”

            Fortunately, the Idel.Real commentator says, Russian sociologists have a role model they can draw on to make this shift. That consists of the work and ideas of Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1968), a Russian sociologist who was forced to emigrate in 1922 after the revolution and became a pioneering sociologist at Harvard (idelreal.org/a/31785097.html).

            Russians have not forgotten him. The state university in Syktyvkar now bears his name, and its Heritage Center has long been involved in both the investigation and popularization of the works of Sorokin, issuing in hard copy and electronically many of his books and essays in Russian that are long out of print or available only in English.

            Sorokin who lived in Russia during the Russo-Japanese war, World War I, and the Russian Civil War focused on all of them both before and after his arrest in 1918 by the Bolsheviks for “counter-revolutionary activity.” He was originally sentenced to death and saw others executed while he was in prison, Yasaveyev says.

            Before being expelled from Russia, he published two important studies, War and the Militarization of Society” and “The Influence of War on the Population, Its Characteristics and Social Organization.” The latter even attracted the attention of Vladimir Lenin although the Bolshevik leader focused on only one part of Sorokin’s conclusions.

            Indeed, the Idel.Real commentator says, Lenin ignored “the main thing in the essays” – Sorokin’s analysis of the consequence of war” and the ways in which wars inevitably transform society in radical ways. Among Sorokin’s conclusions, Yasaveyev says, are the following:

·       “Peace-time life acts as a brake on acts of murder, force, barbarism, lies, theft, spying, corruption, deception and destruction. War on the contrary requires these and encourages their spread.

·       “Peace-time life develops initiative, productive work, creativity and personal freedom; war requires unquestioning and irresponsible obedience in the name of discipline, stifles personal initiative, annuls personal freedom and accustoms people to destructive behavior.

·       “Peace-time life introduces in the population and strengthens their experiences and habits of positive attitudes toward others, love, respect to individuals and their rights, freedom and dignity. War is an apparatus directed at the elimination in people of these reflexes” (P.A. Sorokin, “The Influence of War on the Population, Its Features and Social Organization” in Collected Works (in Russian; Syktyvkar, 2019) at rksorokinctr.org/images/nauka/soch19_23_compressed.pdf).

According to Yasaveyev, Sorokin pointed not only to the immediate consequences of wartime but to the ways in which wars cast a long and dark shadow on societies even decades after they are concluded, something he pointed to in later studies such as Man and Society in Calamity (1942).

In that book in particular, the IdelReal commentator says, he pointed to the ways in which wars have the effect of promoting the ideas of “militarism and totalitarian pseudo-democracy,” ideas that do not end even when the shooting stops. Sorokin’s ideas, Yasaveyev says, clearly are important for Russian sociologists now and in the future.