Soviet sociology must be understood against the background of the Soviet empire which provided its frame of reference as well as most of its substantive topics of enquiry. Sociology in the USSR benefitted from the weakening of totalitarian control in the 1980s. It became possible to develop and express ideas with relative freedom, i.e., controlled by the state in order to halt the rapid dissolution of the ecological and social fabric. Sociologists were in demand to start empirical research, especially on social crises and public opinion. A somewhat technocratic version of sociology focussing on the economy and social stratification came to be officially tolerated as a major contribution to stabilising the remaining Soviet state policy in the period of perestroika.
With the total collapse of the Soviet empire, however, this imperial sociology has lost its raison d'être. The vacuum left by the demise of the empire, in which a civil society has not yet developed, is parallelled by an intellectual vacuum in post-totalitarian sociology. This is only gradually being filled by a regionalisation of sociology in the various new states and its continued internationalisation by professional sociology (especially in Moscow and St. Petersburg). Social research into all aspects of political and social life is spreading throughout the territory of the former empire.
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