Three Faces in Russian Sociology: Surviving Intellectually as Sociologists in a Totalitarian Society.

The author of the article shares his numerous encounters with sociologists. The World Congresses that are organized every forth year by the International Sociological Association (ISA) had never-before 1970-been situated within any of the countries of Eastern Europe which at that time were known as members of the Soviet Bloc. The first ISA World Congress to occur within the Soviet Bloc took place late in the summer of 1970 in Varna, Bulgaria. Sociologist Andrei Zdravomyslov was such an individual, a face emerging out of faceless anonymity. At one of the first plenary sessions in one of the large assembly halls at the World Congress in Varna he presented a paper comparing the conceptual frameworks of Marxian historical materialism and Western structural functionalism. In the debate after the presentation of papers, the author asked for the floor and tried to convey one of his darling ideas, namely that classical Marxism as well as Western structural functionalism lack a proper understanding of certain structural contradictions emerging in what he called "modes of information and cognition" in contemporary societies.