Sociology consists of sub-specialties or sub-disciplines diffeing in their subject matters, theoretical presuppositions and methodological preferences as well as in social profiles of their adherents. This paper uses data from what arguable was the two widest censuses of Russian sociological community – member directory of the Soviet Sociological Association of 1970 and files of participants of the Third All-Russian sociological congress in 2008 – to compare demographic and academic status profiles of major subdisciplinary units. It compares their positions on three principal dimensions – gender composition, share of those having higher academic degrees, and per cent of those living in Moscow. For the Soviet period we find strong and independent correlations between positions on all three dimensions with more academic specializations (mostly male and metropolitan) opposing (mostly female and provincial) applied ones. The evidence shows that later period this clearcut pattern of dominance partly decomposed, probably as a result of loss of control the Moscow establishment over channels of academic promotion in the Perestroika period.