Research for the paper has been done using network and regression analysis, biographic interviews, multidimensional scaling, scientometrics etc. Latent Class Analysis (LCA) method is suggested in order to analyze variations of academic positions and other status dimensions of journal authors. Gender, academic title, position in the Academy of Sciences or in the universities and affiliation was studied to check the hypothesis whether sociology becomes a less prestigious but a more professional field that is left by Nomenclatura and casual people. The work aims at filling the gap in the literature on Soviet sociology of this period.