This historical development had overwhelming impact on the development of sociology in these societies. In Russia we witness further expansion of orthodox Marxism—the development that began right after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, when sociology was removed from universities along with "bourgeois" professors. Historical materialism was proclaimed the only true scientific sociology, whereas the critique of "bourgeois sociology" was the only way of dealing with Western social thought and adopting Western sociological ideas. In the 1950s and 1960s in Russia, a kind of "empirical" Marxist sociology was established. Because of this development, survey research on the conditions of the working class on a large scale was launched and has continued up to this day. This continuing research is atheoretical and purely descriptive.
The so-called Stalinist period, which began right after World War II and lasted until the late fifties, or in some countries even the early sixties, was marked by the almost complete defeat of academic sociology. Sociology was labeled a "bourgeois pseudo-science" (Kolosi and Szelenyi 1993, p. 146), and was abolished as an academic and autonomous discipline. It is hard to overestimate the negative outcomes of this period and the entire period of the communist system in the eastern and central European countries.
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