He was repressed by Vladimir Lenin's communist regime, which led Sorokin to flee to Czechoslovakia with the help of Thomas Masaryk and Edouard Benes.
After her death Sorokin and his elder brother Vasily stayed with their father, traveling with him through the towns searching for work.
The moral qualities (such as piety, a firm belief in good and love) cultivated in him at that time would yield their fruits in his subsequent work (his amitology and call to overcome the crisis of modernity).
After the October Revolution, Sorokin continued to fight communist leaders and was arrested by the new regime several times before he was eventually condemned to death.
[7] Accounts of Sorokin's activities in 1922 differ; he may have been arrested and exiled by the Soviet government,[5] or he may have spent months in hiding before escaping the country.
[7] Sorokin was personally requested to accept a Harvard University position, founding the Department of Sociology and becoming a vocal critic of his colleague, Talcott Parsons.
He first started in February 1917 where he was in the forefront of creating a provisionary government, only to see it unravel and lose power to the Bolsheviks in October 1917.
Sorokin's work follows a pattern throughout time from an early period of miscellaneous writings, sociocultural dynamics and social criticism, and then altruism.
After going to Harvard in 1930, Sorokin found his calling and began his famous study of world civilization which led to the work for which he is best known, Social and Cultural Dynamics.
This condemnation is part of the reason he was always challenged because people were not ready and acceptive of the idea of change and nobody was willing to take responsibility for their actions.
Sorokin's extensive study convinced him that our civilization is overly materialistic, disorganized, and in imminent danger of collapse.
Sorokin argues that American and Russian culture have so much in common that these two nations, destined to be the leading postwar power centers, will have a secure basis for friendship.
[15][16] As a result, for the first time in human history, a World Constituent Assembly convened to draft and adopt the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.
This can be "ideational" (reality is spiritual and immaterial), "sensate" (truth is material and all things are in flux), or "idealistic" (a synthesis of the two).
[5][18] According to Pitirim A. Sorokin, a pioneer of balanced research in altruism, the energy of love has at least five dimensions: Intensity, Extensity, Duration, Purity and the Adequacy of its manifestation in objective actions, in relation to its inner purpose.
He did this by studying the lives of saints, neighbors and other people based upon their sex, gender, race and socioeconomic status.
[13] Defunct Sorokin was politically engaged, studying the legitimacy of power, Russia's representative democracy, and how the national question and democratic structure are intertwined.
He predicted a period of renewal for Russia after the fall of communism and that, out of the crisis this involved, the world could come to embrace altruistic love, a key theme in his later research.
[citation needed] Sorokin founded the Center for the Study of Creative Altruism at Harvard, where he developed quantitative and qualitative research into the ethics of love and social solidarity.
[citation needed] With the financial assistance of Eli Lilly, a friend of Sorokin who was a pharmaceutical heir, he was able to do further research in creative altruism.
Thus, he was allowed to create "The Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism" in 1949 and had two instructors under him, Alfredo Gotsky and Talcott Parsons.
A lot of sociologists at the time are beginning to refine older theories and works, while adapting to growth in society.
Sorokin himself worked to verify the methods of preceding sociologists, while taking a look into the future of sociology and in what aspects it could grow and be influenced.
Carlson also considered himself pro-family and agreed with Sorokin's views on how a family's most ideal environment is living in intimate, small village-like towns.
Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin found that throughout history, the societal collapse was always brought about following the advent of the deterioration of marriage and family”.
[24] Sorokin wrote president John F. Kennedy in 1961 when the United States were at a peak level of friction with Russia.
Sorokin suffered from a severe illness, and after struggling for two years, he died on 10 February 1968, aged 79, in Winchester, Massachusetts.
The first research project, "Selected Correspondence of Pitirim Sorokin: Scientist from Komi on The Service of Humanity" (in Russian), has been drafted and will be in print in the fall of 2009 in Russia.