On Soviet Rural Sociology

Abstract

This interview with Tatyana Ivanovna Zaslavskaya was conducted in January 2000 for the purpose of publishing it in the yearbook “Krestyanovoedenie” (“Peasant Studies”) published at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. But it was in that year that the publication of the yearbook was interrupted for several years, and the interview was lost in the archives of “Krestyanovoedenie” for another quarter of a century.

In this interview, T. I. Zaslavskaya talks about the intermittent stages of the formation and development of Soviet rural sociology, about her own rural sociological research in connection with the research activities of a number of Russian and foreign rural sociologists.

Particular attention in the interview is given to the discussion of the stages of research activities of the Novosibirsk sociological school. Zaslavskaya reflects on the problems of interaction between a scientist and the authorities, considers the paradoxes of the search for predictive alternatives to socialist rural development associated with experiments in reforming Soviet agriculture.

The interview was conducted by Alexander Nikulin, an employee of the Intercenter/MSSES at the time of the interview, currently a candidate of economic sciences, director of the RANEPA Center for Agrarian Studies, editor-in-chief of the journal “Russian Peasant Studies”.

For citation: Zaslavskaya, T. (2025). On Soviet Rural Sociology. Russia’s Directions. Vol. 3. No. 3. P. 138–159.

Additional Info

Submitted: August 18, 2025

Copyright: © Auhtors, 2025

Distribution: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)