Pitirim a. Sorokin

(January 21, 1889 – February 11, 1968)

S orokin was born on January 21, 1889, in a remote village in northern Russia's Vologda Province, inhabited by a non-Russian people of Ugro-Finnish origin, the Komi. The future analyst of social stratification had little to draw upon from childhood memories, except by way of contrast when he set upon this task many years later in a totally different environment, the state of Minnesota. Sorokin was only three years old when his mother died-her funeral was the first conscious recollection etched in his mind. His father was of Russian origin, born in Veliki Ustyug, an ancient northern city that was a center of arts and crafts. He had served his apprenticeship in one of the artisan guilds and had gained his diploma as "a master of golden, silver and ikon ornamental works." He subsequently moved to a Komi village and there married a young woman who bore him three sons-Vassily, Pitirim, and Prokopiy.

Pitirim, at the age of fourteen, secured a modest scholarship at the Khrenovo Teachers' Seminary. Travelling to the seminary by steamer and rail-road, the young country lad had for the first time an intimation of the charac-teristics of big cities and industrial regions. The world of peasant culture, of rural folkways, of religious custom and of semipagan folklore now lay behind him, never to be reentered except for short periods, but always to be retained in his imagination and memory. Though he was to go on to live in the rapidly evolving urban and industrial Gesellschaft of Russian, and later, American cities, his life work was shaped to a large extent by his formative years in the village Gemeinschaften of the Komi people of the northern forest.

He soon was the leader of his class, despite his previous nomadic life and his previous sporadic schooling. The seminary, which was run by the Russian Orthodox Church, was concerned primarily with training teachers for the Church's elementary schools. But because it was located near sizable urban and industrial centers-and hence open to the winds of new doctrines-the school actually provided a quality of education more advanced than most other seminaries. Students and teachers freely interacted with townspeople, with the local intelligentsia, and with leaders of political opinions of all shades, from monarchists to Social Revolutionaries and Social Democrats. Immersing himself in the study of a variety of new books, journals, and newspapers that his newly won friends and acquaintances had thrust upon him, Sorokin soon shed his previous Orthodox religious and philosophical beliefs. The new ideas he was exposed to and his growing awareness of the miserable social and political conditions of Imperial Russia soon turned the peasant youth into an urban agnostic, a believer in scientific theories of evolution, and an active revolutionary Nevertheless, because he still clung to his earlier belief in self-help and individualism, he was repelled by the Marxist determinism of Social Democracy; young Sorokin became instead an ardent member of the populist Social Revolutionary party. Though now an urbanite, he was still powerfully attracted by the Gemeinschaft populism of the Narodniki, whose gospel he was helping to spread among students and factory workers, as well as the peasants of the surrounding countryside.

On the eve of the school's Christmas vacation in 1906, Sorokin was scheduled to address a group of workers and peasants. As he entered the meeting hall the police arrested him, escorted him to a horse-and-sleigh, and delivered him to a local prison. Prison treatment during the last years of the Czar's regime was no longer as harsh and inhuman as it had been in previous days. Prisons by now in fact became "graduate educational institutions" for revolutionaries, who gathered in interminable discussions of revolutionary theory and used their enforced leisure to read the works of Marx and Engels, of Kropotkin and Lavrov, of Tolstoi, Plekhanov and Lenin, as well as Darwin, Spencer, and other evolutionist and "progressive" thinkers. Sorokin probably learned more in prison than he could have absorbed in an entire semester's work at his Seminary.

Prison also afforded Sorokin his first acquaintance with common criminals and this led to his choice of criminology and penology as his area of specialization during his later stay at St Petersburg University. In addition, Sorokin transmuted his lived experience into academic knowledge his first book, Crime and Punishment, Service and Reward, was published seven years after his first imprisonment.

Sorokin remained in prison four months before he was released. Though discharged from his school, he was received by most teachers and students as a hero of the revolution; yet stigmatized as a revolutionary, he could not be admitted to another school nor could he find any type of employment in the region. He therefore resolved to become an itinerant preacher spreading the revolutionary message, not unlike his earlier experience with painted ikons. Pitirim Sorokin, sought by the police for escaping from their supervision in his place of residence, disappeared, and an anonymous "Comrade Ivan" emerged as an organizer, speaker, and instructor among factory workers, students, and peasants throughout the Volga region. Most of the meetings he addressed and the demonstrations he led were peaceful affairs, but on one occasion, with a large group gathered together, Comrade Ivan, standing on a tree stump high above the crowd, fiercely denounced the regime. The meeting was broken up by the police with whips and sabers, which resulted in the deaths of two workers and a police officer and the wounding of several Cossacks, workers, and policemen. Thereafter, upon the urgings of his friends, Comrade Ivan retired to his aunt's house in the Komi village of Rymia, where he stayed for two months, helping with the farm work and visiting with boyhood friends. With no hope of continuing his education or of finding employment, Sorokin resolved in the fall of 1907 to make his way to St. Petersburg.