Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

The sociological study of the Soviet sphere was a focus of Western scholarship for decades. Debates over the nature of Soviet society—what is the USSR?–garnered the attention of many of the discipline’s leading scholars. Even when the Soviet sphere was not the immediate research topic, the USSR’s existence had to be accounted for across many areas of theoretical and practical study—social class, the state, power, elites, ideology, nationalism, ethnicity, revolution, development and underdevelopment, welfare states, etc. The sociological analysis of modern capitalist society could not occur without a consideration of the Soviet experiment. As global capitalism began to take on new features in the 1970s and 1980s, sociologists responded by initiating an intensive study of globalization. Interestingly, however, the consequences of globalization for the USSR received relatively little consideration. When “history ended” in 1991 with the triumph of the new global capitalism—a development unanticipated by sociologists–decades worth of research on the Soviet sphere was left by the wayside. While new scholarship appeared in the form “transition studies,” the question of what the dissolution of the USSR revealed about the nature of Soviet society rarely got attention. Nor was there much consideration of the implications of the twentieth century’s socialist experiment for the new global capitalism. This paper documents and seeks to explain why this lacunae exists. It also examines the implications of globalization and the collapse of the Soviet sphere for two of the major theories of the Soviet state—state socialism and state capitalism.