№ 4 - 2004
Vorobyov D.M.
Political Science in the USSR: Formation and Development of a Scientific Community

Detailed analysis of the activity of the Soviet Political Science Association enables the author to refute the prevalent idea that in the Soviet period, development of political science in Russia in point of fact discontinued. According to his account, it’s exactly in that period that in the country a political-science community formed, which was carrying out productive scientific work and used the available scientific infrastructure and the potential of the higher school for establishing political science and for the increase of knowledge. It is at the same time demonstrated in the article that the said community remained numerically very scanty and the intellectual product it was turning out was not demanded by the political leadership of the country. What was negatively telling on the development of Russian political science, in the author’s estimation, was, too, lack of continuity of scholarly traditions as would have been secured by a system of reproduction of scientific personnel training.