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the same effect in countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
Only in Yugoslavia did a sociology autonomous of state and party
control emerge. Marxist and critical, theoretic in substance but empirical
in focus, Yugoslav sociology had to defend itself against inane denigra–
tion in the East and incomprehension in the West.
In the last decade, the decomposition of Stalinism and the growth
of productive capacity in the state socialist regimes have altered the
situation. In Poland and Czechoslovakia a suppressed sociological tradi–
tion often Social Democratic in inspiration was reborn. In Hungary,
while the aging Lukacs labors away at his treatises, his younger disciples
do empirical sociology. The crosscurrents of Communist politics at times
silence a sociology which has refused to become a sloganized exegesis of
party programs, but the intellectual territory liberated by the sociologists
has not all been lost. Paradoxically though, the resilience and honesty
of
sociology in Eastern Europe owes much to the Communist technocrats'
need for reliable information as a mode of extending and consolidating
their rule. The increasing complexity of administration, distribution and
political manipulation in societies now entering the advanced stages of
industrialization, and the need for reliable data on consumer preference,
educational and occupational discipline and political opinion, leave the
technocrats little choice but to encourage certain kinds of sociology.
Once merely housed in Moscow in the Institute of Philosophy of the
Academy of Sciences (an Institute not so long ago notorious among the
learned in the Soviet Union as an assemblage of ideological hacks), so–
ciology now has found other quarters. Moscow now also has an Institute
of Concrete Social Research. In Akadamsgorod, near Novosibirsk, com–
puterized and mathematical models of behavior are advanced with an
ardor we saw in this country two decades ago. The technocratic cultiva–
tion of sociology, however, is a constant internal threat to the Soviet
Union's intellectual controllers: suppose the sociolgists do not confine
themselves to the execution of technocratic directives for data collec–
tion but begin, instead, to think critically about society? This is what
happened in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland. Indeed, the Varna
Congress was a gigantic mechanism of defense against this possibility.
The first line of defense was left to the Bulgarians. The organiza–
tion, if it can be dignified by that word, of the Congress did not seem
to come from Moscow (many Soviet colleagues were revulsed by the
local arrangements). The Bulgarians, among the most retrograde of
regimes in Eastern Europe, probably acted instinctively. The impression
of openness had to be given, but the effects of genuine oppenness had
to
be minimized, since they could not be entirely eliminated. Masterful
only in their disorganization, lack of coherence and inability to deal
