Trends in the Development of Political Science in Russia

Abstract

The totalitarian regime in Russia and its system of administering science had ruinous consequences for the social sciences as a whole and for political science in particular. The social sciences can develop only in a civil society, where they are free of state pressure and where the development of knowledge about society is a permanent need of society itself. Having swallowed up civil society, the totalitarian state was not interested in developing the social sciences, because objective knowledge of the laws of social development represents a real threat to an authoritarian bureaucratic regime, raising a challenge to its ideological monopoly and calling its legitimacy into question. Insofar as the state saw the progress of the technical and natural sciences as a means to fortify its own power, its interest in the social sciences was distorted: a totalitarian state needed an apologetic, biased "science," the purpose of which was to provide a post factum justification and a "theoretical foundation" for socially significant decisions made by the Party and state nomenklatura.