It is now clear that the immediate pre-Gorbachev years were more than merely years of "stagnation." This was also a period in which the unfolding of debate on economic reform helped set the stage for the reforms introduced by the Gorbachev political leadership in the late 1980s (Hewett, 1988, ch. 6; Aslund, 1989, ch. 5). But the reformist themes sounded in the first half of the decade were not confined to the strictly economic literature. They also appeared in the writings of some of the country's leading sociologists and psychologists. Indeed, our principal concern here is to demonstrate that the multidisciplinary reformist undercurrents of the years of "stagnation" provided a language, a set of ideas, and a conceptual apparatus on which a future political leadership would draw and also contributed to the intellectual discourse and controversies of the Gorbachev years examined in subsequent chapters. To put it in somewhat different but perhaps more direct terms, the break with the past represented by the Gorbachev years also rests on certain continuities.