The Soviet political science tradition in universities: Politics and political science in the works of Alexander Kovalev

In the contemporary history of Russian political science, there is a common view that the formation of the Soviet political scientific tradition and Russian political science occurs in the late 1980s - early 1990s. That was the time when Russian political science began to gain its subjectivity, borrowing its tools and agenda from the West: from an understanding of “politics” and “power” to the fashion to research some popular issues as democratization and modernization. One of the objectives of this article is to present an alternative point of view and draw some attention not only to the duration of the history of the Soviet political scientific tradition but also to the developments of domestic authors, demonstrating their intellectual connection with foreign colleagues even in conditions of ideological isolation. The literature review shows that the issue of the Soviet political scientific tradition developing, especially in universities, is given quite a little attention, especially against the background of the study of the institutional and organizational development of Soviet political science in academic institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and, later, political science in Russian universities and analytical centers. The authors draw attention to this issue, following the formation of the Soviet political science tradition in universities with examples from the works of Professor of Moscow University Alexander Kovalev, considering his ideas on politics in the context of world political theory development, its history, and modern approaches. The intellectual legacy of Kovalev demonstrates the importance of such addressing to local subjects of the history of political science of Russia, where the gap between the Soviet and foreign research agenda is not as large as is generally believed. The Soviet political science tradition, including its university branch, reveals its connection with world research in many aspects related to raising the question of politics and the political, in studies of the functions and tasks of politics and political theory, in attention to human nature. The special emphasis on the regulatory and clarifying nature of the political, as shown in the article, brings the positions of Kovalev closer to the positions of modern constructivism and phenomenology in the sociology of knowledge, to the positions of institutionalism, which emphasizes the problem of uncertainty of political behavior. Today we see interest in such phenomena in sociocultural studies of human behavior and values that have a significant impact on public administration. However, it is also important to study how these research interests have historically developed, including within the framework of Soviet political science.

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