Ten Years of Academic Political Science: Scientific Knowledge on a New Scale

Abstract

From the editors: Under the special rubric of "The Tenth Anniversary of Political Science in Russia," established to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the official recognition of political science in Russia, we have included the most varied materials in terms of content. The reader can be sure that there are no "pompous eulogies"; after noting certain achievements, we preferred to mark our professional anniversary by discussing the problems that confront political scientists as a group. We regard this corpus as a single organism, whose multidirectional and well-planned development is a matter of professional honor for political scientists, editors, and publishers in the field of political science. The recent parliamentary elections and a number of other institutional processes, with all their distinctive features, have demonstrated the onesided development of political science in Russia: both society and the power structures wanted almost nothing from our scholars but applied political technologies. Here we do not discuss their content, but we note that the reduction of political science to a unique form of "social engineering" distorts not only the discipline itself but the entire political process, which here in Russia is becoming misshapen.