Improving Social Science in the Former Soviet Union: The U.S. Role (1992)

With all the obvious problems of the post-Soviet transition—hyperinflation, declining standards of living, ethnic conflict, political uncertainty, and the like—it may seem that the needs of the social and behavioral sciences would not rank high on the list of priorities. But strong social science in the former Soviet Union is critical in several ways. It is necessary for the development of enduring democracy in the successor states. It is critical to U.S. national interests in the region and in the global democratization process. And it is important to advancing scientific understanding in the world. Because of the current crisis situation in the former Soviet region, it is important to act now to assist the forces in the region that are working to build vital social science communities. We consider that the best way to assist this development is to adopt a pluralistic approach that works with diverse private and public institutions in the post-Soviet states that are striving to improve research and education in the social and behavioral sciences.

If there is to be a successful, long-term transition from the Soviet system to some form of democracy, strong communities of independent social analysts must emerge in the post-Soviet states. Support is critically needed now to save essential human and data resources and to prevent the loss of an entire new generation of social and behavioral scientists. The importance of this generation—the first to be trained under conditions of free inquiry and exposed to a competition of theories and methods—cannot be overestimated. It will play a crucial role in the evolving socioeconomic transformation of those states by eliminating the vestiges of ideologized, “old thinking” in research and education; by providing empirical findings to policy makers, and independent, scientifically based analyses of social policies and trends to society at large; and by instructing future generations. Members of the new generation will be a bulwark of support for policies that promote full participation in the global scientific community and create a culture of research that both incorporates and is predicated on international standards.

We recommend Western assistance to the social and behavioral sciences in the states of the former Soviet Union in the spirit of scientific cooperation and collaboration. The scientific enterprise transcends national borders, and no particular scientific community holds a monopoly on truth or can represent itself as a model for others. There are diverse scientific traditions, and different ways of pursuing similar ends. However, the commitment to science—to the attainment of results on the basis of empirical evidence, to the rigorous testing of hypotheses, to the elaboration of verifiable methods—is a bond that unites diverse communities of scholars and scientists. In recommending the adoption of peer review, competitive awards, merit-based selection, and open access to information, we are suggesting processes that have been tested internationally and have demonstrated their efficacy in diverse social and economic settings.

The post-Soviet transition is causing upheavals in a large and important part of the world. For the United States to respond effectively to the political, social, and economic changes taking place there, to help avert political crises, and to promote economic revitalization, accurate understanding of those changes is necessary. Over the long run, the most cost-effective way to develop this understanding is for local social scientists to collect the necessary data and participate in its analysis. As more open societies develop on the former Soviet lands, it will be possible for Western analysts to efficiently use the new data, thereby improving the quality of the work performed outside the former Soviet Union. Thus, a small investment in improving the quality of local information and upgrading the skills of local analysts can accomplish at least as much as a far larger investment in analysis from afar.

Improved social science can also make a critical contribution to democratic transitions in the formerly Soviet states. The potential for authoritarian rule has not been eliminated, and democratic forces are appealing for assistance. One of the most important bulwarks of democracy is the ability of individuals and institutions outside the government to conduct and publish independent analyses of political, economic, and social trends. Free inquiry, and especially high-quality social science analysis of data, is a critical antidote to government falsification, misinformation, and any attempts to reassert an ideological monopoly. It is in the interests of the United States and other free countries to promote pluralist social analysis in the formerly Soviet countries to assist efforts to resist any possible reimposition of monolithic state structures.

Healthy social science in the former Soviet Union is also important for the world scientific community. Future analysts will surely conclude that the transition from Communism to other social and economic systems that is now under way in the former Soviet Union constitutes one of the great social experiments of this or any century. It is critical to collect the data now, during the experiment’s formative early years, to enable future historians and social scientists—as well as policy practitioners in other democratizing states—to base their theories and practice on an accurate understanding of the transition. By far the most effective way to collect data on an ongoing social experiment is to have adequately trained and supported investigators working in the field. Presently, the social and behavioral sciences in the former Soviet republics lack both the trained personnel and the material resources for the task, but important advances can be made quickly with American and other foreign cooperation.

The post-Soviet experiment is important not only in its own right, but also because it provides a unique laboratory in which to test existing theories and presumptions in social science and to develop new ones. Fifteen countries, with common political and economic institutions but with vastly different cultural backgrounds and levels of development, are undertaking far-reaching socioeconomic transformations. Each country’s experience can therefore be interpreted with fourteen comparison cases. The unfolding history will offer tests of current thinking on such key issues as: the cultural bases for the emergence of democracy, the conditions for the development of markets, the relative priority of market relations and democratic politics for the development of liberal democratic states, the roles of cultural and religious history in social change, the roots of ethnic conflict, and many others. The data must be collected quickly, however, to take advantage of this unique opportunity.

Assistance to social science communities in the former Soviet Union is also essential for maintaining important existing data bases and human resources. Soviet researchers and government agencies collected and compiled tremendous amounts of data during the Soviet period, some of which are vital to an understanding of the Soviet experience, and some of which may provide critical baseline information for assessing post-Soviet trends. Although much of the information is of poor quality, potentially valuable data sets exist. However, the data face the threat of being discarded; purposely destroyed; or captured by entrepreneurs for commercial use, outside the normal scrutiny of the international scientific community. It is necessary to evaluate existing data sets before they are lost, identify the sets that are potentially useful, document them transform them into usable forms, and make them available openly to the international social science community.

It is equally necessary to preserve critical library and archival resources, both for the next generation of local social scientists and for the international research community. Libraries and related institutions in the former Soviet Union are wrestling with fundamental problems: how to preserve and catalogue their collections, how to finance their operations, how to assist researchers, how to maintain foreign acquisitions, and how to automate their activities. Both domestic and foreign social and behavioral scientists need access to these research materials and resources that are in danger of decay, theft, and commercialization. Domestic scientists also need access to the resources of the international community in order to produce first-class work and join fully in serious scientific efforts.

The workshop participants considered it a first priority to establish electronic communications that would enable scientists in these countries to gain access to international and domestic materials, resources, and scholarly networks. The need for widespread, reliable communications cannot be overestimated. It will permit ongoing international exchange of ideas and materials, encourage collaboration and cross-fertilization, and save researchers the effort of reinventing or rediscovering knowledge that already exists. As was recently demonstrated in China, the dispersion of computers, facsimile transmission machines, and advanced communications technology can also provide the international scientific community with the information necessary to assist local colleagues in periods of government repression.

Scientific human resources in the former Soviet Union are threatened by both internal and external “brain drains.” The loss of their salaries is driving social and behavioral scientists to find alternative employment, either in other fields at home or outside the country. Particularly damaging is the fact that students are opting out of the social and behavioral sciences, despite the tremendous intellectual attraction of these fields and their importance in the democratization process, because they do not see the possibility of career paths in them. This loss affects not only the home countries,

but also the international scientific community, which needs an active presence in the new states and can only suffer from the loss of talented colleagues.

In recommending assistance to the post-Soviet social and behavioral sciences, we recognize their checkered past. Social and behavioral scientists and the institutions within which they functioned suffered from repression and censorship and also served as instruments of ideological domination. As a consequence, many potentially useful social science institutions are being marginalized during the current transition. Nevertheless, there is a reserve of talent in the social and behavioral sciences, particularly among younger researchers who resisted the old regime’s ideology, that can serve as the foundation for new scientific structures. It is important that valuable human and data resources not be discarded along with the detritus of the old regime. It is equally important that the former Soviet states recover their repressed social memory rather than burying or burning it. The West is being asked to support a modest effort targeted to save what is most important from the past and to preserve what is needed to build the future.

Although the consequences of inaction are less dramatic for unemployed social and behavioral scientists than for unemployed weapons scientists, the loss of support for social science in the former Soviet states could have serious consequences both domestically and internationally. Development of a new generation of social scientists trained in internationally accepted methods is critical to the creation of informed public debate and criticism. Without that development, politics in the region may well continue as a battle of ideologies, relatively free of independent empirical testing. The result is likely to be harmful to everyone: U.S. interests, the democratizing governments, the local population, and global scientific understanding.

A modest level of assistance now can help to contain this deterioration and establish a solid base on which the social and behavioral sciences can build in the future. It can keep the best personnel employed in their fields so they will be in a position to train younger scholars, provide policy advice and offer informed, independent criticism. It can give young scholars hope for a future in social science. It can maintain critical data sets and library resources for the next generation and for international social science. It can collect the data on the post-Soviet experiment that will be needed to evaluate its meaning and its implications for social science theory. It can assure access to local materials for the international scientific community. And it can bring social science in the region into meaningful participation in the world social scientific community.

The social and behavioral sciences in the former Soviet Union require assistance to overcome the legacy of seven decades of ideological distortion and to survive the current socioeconomic transformation. Throughout the Soviet period, scientific inquiry was effectively suppressed or seriously skewed in all but a few subfields of the social and behavioral sciences. (A few areas, including archaeology and mathematical modeling and neuroscience within psychology, remained largely unpoliticized.) In the fields that are most relevant to the problems of the contemporary transition period and the needs of post-Soviet societies—sociology, political science, ethnology, applied economics, and others—free inquiry and empirically based science was usurped by a system of ideological controls that was labeled social science. This deformation occurred, of course, not only

in the Russian Federation, but throughout the entire Soviet Union, and the legacy of repression is shared to varying degrees by all the successor states.

Despite the controls and censorship, certain individuals were able to produce good work in a number of fields. However, the overwhelming majority of those who are now nominally working in the social and behavioral sciences have no real experience or training in either the theory or methodology of the social and behavioral sciences. Their training was largely limited to Marxist-Leninist exegesis; it did not encourage critical thinking or address such tasks as posing innovative research questions, testing hypotheses, and evaluating alternative interpretations of data. As a result, the post-Soviet successor states need immediate assistance in forming effective plans to train both active social scientists and researchers and the teachers who will train the next generations of social and behavioral scientists. The very best researchers and teachers of the present generation who produced good work in the past against nearly insurmountable obstacles also need assistance at this time—to strengthen their skills, increase contacts with scholars abroad, and pursue their research goals.

The current economic dislocations have left social scientists in the Russian Federation and the other post-Soviet states with fundamental subsistence needs that take precedence over needs for training and research. In view of the historical role of Soviet social science, there is also political resistance within many of these countries to allocating scarce resources to these fields. Nevertheless, the needs are both real and pressing. A “brain drain” into more lucrative areas of employment will leave these societies less capable of successfully weathering the socioeconomic strains of the transition, establishing democratic, pluralistic societies, and developing autonomous educational and scientific institutions. Modest amounts of assistance can make a very large difference if delivered quickly.

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has been asked to offer assistance in the radical restructuring and “deideologization” of social science in the Russian Federation. A major obstacle to change is the organizational and institutional legacy of Soviet social science. As components of a command-and-control socioeconomic system, the structure of social science was hierarchical, heavily bureaucratized, and focused on issues of centralized management and control of information. Careers often depended on patronage or ideological acceptability more than on merit, so that the most capable scientists were not always found in the most prominent positions. Some of the most critical needs of the present period are therefore institutional.

Reform requires the replacement of the old hierarchical organizational structures with more pluralistic systems and of personalistic and ideological decision procedures with more science-based rules. A reformed social science must be based on competition of ideas, open access to information, a plurality of information sources and methods of analysis, advancement of ideas and individuals on the basis of merit, and the development of autonomous institutions that are independent of government ideological and fiscal control. It requires, for instance, the development of peer-review and merit-based evaluation procedures that identify the best qualified individuals on the basis of their ideas and work.

We recognize that contributing to social and behavioral science in the former Soviet countries is a risky investment. Efforts from outside may fail because forces within the countries derail democratization entirely or return control of social science to familiar patronage systems. We believe, however, that the risks of a modest investment are well worth taking because if democratization survives in the short term, stronger social science can contribute powerfully to its long-term continuation.

We offer 13 recommendations to assist social science in the former Soviet Union: the first 4 are for immediate action; the next 9 are for activities that need to be set up for the medium and long range. These key recommendations were selected from the more than three dozen recommendations suggested by the working groups. We do not reject those suggestions, but we believe these 13 recommendations are key at this time. This section ends with a brief discussion of the role of our recommendations in the context of other ongoing assistance to social science in the former Soviet Union.

1. Preserve and maintain key library collections. A top priority should be to maintain irreplaceable library and archive collections at the Institute of Scientific Information in the Social Sciences (INION) in Moscow and other core centers. Assistance should be conditioned on the libraries’ making their resources available to all researchers regardless of institutional affiliation.

2. Provide access to international electronic mail networks. A major effort should be undertaken immediately to provide access to international electronic communications for all major social science and humanities research centers, universities, and libraries in the former Soviet Union. This would provide access for local researchers to international research resources, make possible open communication between researchers and students in the former Soviet Union without dependence on central gate-keeping institutions, improve integration of local researchers into the international community, increase independent publication possibilities, and provide access to computer-assisted learning programs throughout the region. The effort would involve, at minimum, the provision of computers and peripherals and the training of technical personnel.

3. Establish an emergency small-grants program. A small-grants program could support significant work by the most capable remaining researchers during the transition and help retrieve and salvage key data sets. Funds would be open to all applicants on a competitive basis with selection by peer review (initially conducted by a committee including Americans and scholars from former Soviet states), with priority given to young researchers. Grants would be available for substantive empirical research, salvage and documentation of important data sets, and other projects that would simultaneously keep researchers working in their fields and build a basis for high-quality future research. (Other projects might include translating the classics of twentieth century social science and writing new textbooks in basic fields of social science.) This recommendation assumes that in the current environment, even very modest grants can have major impact.

4. Establish mechanisms by which institutions in the former Soviet Union can get advice from American specialists on institutional innovations for social science. Americans can provide useful advice to institutions in the new states that are beginning to set up procedures for accrediting universities and programs, providing merit review of proposals, setting social science research priorities, and so forth. Timely foreign assistance in such matters of institutional design, which is already being requested, can have a great effect on the long-term ability of transformed scientific and educational institutions to support and maintain high-quality, pluralistic social science.

5. Establish a flexible program to support short workshops and institutes of up to one month duration. Following the “Salzburg Institute” model, the program should support a variety of short-term, intensive activities that provide training in methods, help develop fields of applied social science (for example, clinical psychology, social work, urban planning), address administrative topics (such as how to organize an accreditation system), and meet other emerging needs. Activities would be selected by peer review of proposals, which would come from international groups of substantive and area specialists. Workshops and institutes might be located inside or outside the former Soviet Union.

6. Strengthen libraries with computers, reference materials, and training. Research libraries need to gain computerized access to foreign materials as well as to improve their holdings of the most important reference materials. Librarians need training in the use of computers and online systems. Support should be provided for these purposes, starting with the most-used libraries.

7. Disseminate information about training opportunities in the United States. For open access to foreign training, information about opportunities must be widely distributed. A small investment in making the information available through electronic mail, newspaper advertising, and other dispersed media will broaden access beyond the individuals who are now well connected within the system.

8. Supplement existing grants for social research in the former Soviet Union with funds for apprenticeships for local researchers. Organizations that support social research on the former Soviet Union should make available small supplements to approved grants to hire local researchers on the projects. Such apprenticeships would provide valuable, low-cost assistance with the research, alleviate the problem of brain drain, and train local researchers in the use of Western methods.

9. Support identification of usable data sets and documentation and transcription of the data. A program of data restoration is needed to make key data sets available to the international community. These data sets include small, high-quality social surveys as well as some of the larger databases that are housed in various research centers and ministries. Support for documenting and computerizing the most useful data sets would have modest cost and high payoff for science and for collective memory of the Soviet era. Selection of which data sets are of sufficient quality and substantive importance to warrant such processing could be made by an international research committee, and support for data restoration should be conditioned on guarantees of open access.

10. Provide model curricula for new universities and programs. U.S. universities, professional associations, and individual teachers should make curricula available to institutions in the former Soviet Union that are developing new training programs in social science. A variety of “model” curricula should be provided for any given subject. The process would be greatly assisted by having a common collection point and minimal support for reproduction and dissemination.

11. Aid in establishing new voluntary professional organizations in the social sciences where needed. Professional associations in the United States should assist groups that are establishing similar associations in the former Soviet Union, as long as the groups are voluntary in

membership and sponsor large-scale meetings with open attendance. Such associations already exist in some social scientific fields, particularly in the Russian Federation. The provision of subscriptions to professional journals to the corresponding associations should also be encouraged.

12. Provide subsidies for test and application fees for admission to U.S. graduate training programs. Graduate school application fees, which must be paid in dollars, constitute a significant barrier to students who are applying from the formerly Soviet countries.

13. Support first-year fellowships for students from the former Soviet Union admitted to graduate study in the United States. First-year support is one of the most significant barriers to U.S. training for foreign students. Students who pass this barrier will then have access to existing programs of teaching and research support that are available to second-year graduate students.

We recognize that a number of programs already exist to help improve social science in the former Soviet Union. These include scientific and educational exchange programs sponsored by the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the U.S. government, and various universities; direct assistance from private foundations and social science professional associations; and many other programs based in the United States and elsewhere. Such programs provide an essential base for support of social science in the region, and these recommendations are not intended to draw resources from them. Multilateral efforts are particularly important because they can offer access to the widest possible range of expertise, methods, and organizational models.

Our recommendations direct attention to the most critical needs for support that can come from the United States in the present emergency situation and during the transition from the Soviet organization of social science to new systems. Some of the recommendations might best be administered through organizations that have ongoing programs in the region; some will benefit from new administrative forms; others can best be thought of as enhancing the quality of the flow of information through what is becoming an increasingly fluid and decentralized system.

Existing programs that focus mainly on the natural sciences may be usefully expanded to include social and behavioral science or used as models for parallel programs in the social sciences. For example, the National Science Foundation’s efforts to support collaborative research in the former Soviet Union and to provide computers to American grantees’ collaborators there have so far included only a few social science projects. The efforts of the American Physical Society to provide small grants to researchers in the former Soviet Union, establish systems of peer review, and offer journal subscriptions to libraries provide a model that could be followed or adapted by professional associations in the social sciences. And the proposal for a U.S.-Russian science foundation, initiated largely out of concern about the future of scientists from the Soviet defense sector, could be broadly interpreted to include the best social scientists as well.