Pitirim A. Sorokin

Pitirim A. Sorokin, professor of Sociology, Emeritus, was imprisoned in Northern Russia in 1918, waiting to be executed for anti-Bolshevik activities when he learned that Lenin had personally intervened to save his life.

In a two-page article in Pravda, Lenin defended the former minister in Kerensky's Cabinet, and vouched for his revolutionary purity. Sorokin was immediately released, brought to Moscow, and offered a government position which he did not accept.

He returned instead to the Sociology department he had founded at the University of Petrograd. Among the daily auditors in his classes, Sorokin says, were two spies from CHEKA (the new government's secret police) who reported his lectures as ideologically objectionable.

Lenin's hopes that Sorokin would convert to devout Bolshevism were disappointed. In new articles Lenin attacked Sorokin, calling him "typical of the most implacable part of the Russian intelligentsia," and in 1922 Sorokin was banished from Russia.

He stayed in Czechoslovakia for a few months, then came to the United States in 1923, eventually becoming professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Six years later he accepted Harvard's invitation to set up a department of Sociology here.

Sorokin has not taught a class for almost 20 years, but be continues to write and give occasional lectures. At 77 he lives in Winchester, devoting considerable time to his garden, especially his azaleas, which he describes as "old and somewhat senile -- like myself."

He speaks English well, but with a thick Russian accent. He smokes a great deal (a habit he acquired at 15 when jailed for spreading anti-Czarist propaganda), holding his cigarettes in the European manner -- between thumb and index finger with palm toward the mouth.

Like many immodest men Sorokin finds great pleasure in feigning humility. He points out that interest in his sociological ideas ("my yarns") is reviving in Russia. Or he mentions a Rutgers University speaking invitation, calling him one of the world's most distinguished teachers, and adds, "I cannot understand why they would have wanted me."

He takes justfiiable pride in his international reputation. A member of the Russian delegation to a Congress of Sociologists told him recently that he was the most eminent non-Marxian sociologist in the world. He has bookshelves filled with his own works and their translations into virtually every major language.

His pride extends to the Sociology department he headed at Harvard. It was one of the smallest in the country, he points out, but during his 12 years as chairman it turned out at least one-third of the leaders of contemporary American sociology.

But Sorokin is frequently dissatisfied. He objects to many recent University appointments in the social and political sciences, charging that many new Faculty members are not scholars, but "good little bureaucrats from the State Department."

Faculty members place too much emphasis on money, he claims. During his six years at Minnesota he wrote about a dozen books and received only $12.43 in grants. He is accordingly unimpressed when told of huge grants. "The correlation between the amount of money spent for research and the significance of the results of that research is either non-existent or negative," he says.

His greatest scorn is reserved for United States foreign policy. He maintains that the period of cruelty in Russia is over, and that since World War II the policies of the USSR have been better directed toward peace than those of the U.S.

Concern for peace impelled Sorokin to found the "Harvard Center for Research in Creative Altruism" in 1949. As its first and only chairman Sorokin has often been criticized, more often ridiculed. His research into the lives of 4600 Christian saints and 500 living American altruists, his descriptions of five-dimensional love, and his study of Raja-Yoga techniques have led many to regard him mistakenly as a ludicrous eccentric.

He explains his motivation intelligently and convincingly: "Since governments, big foundations, and better brains seem to be absorbed mainly in the promotion of wars and in the invention of increasingly destructive means for the extermination of man by man, someone, somehow, and sometime had to engage in the study of the phenomena of unselfish love, no matter how inadequate were his capabilities or how low the esteem of his colleagues for his engaging in such a 'foolish enterprise.'"

Working with scholars whom no one considers eccentric, Sorokin has produced a dozen books on altruism -- and they are widely respected.

Most of Winchester's residents have never heard of Pitirim A. Sorokin or his Center for Research in Creative Altruism. Sorokin lives a quiet life, befitting a retired college professor. His neighbors would probably be aghast to hear they are living next to a man once on speaking terms with Lenin and Trotsky, who was sentenced to death and then banished from his country, and who has produced some of sociology's most important "yarns."