Politics, Work, and Daily Life in the USSR A Survey of Former Soviet Citizens

This book illustrates how the Soviet social system works and how the Soviet people cope with it.

Politics, work, and daily life in the USSR is designed to illustrate how the Soviet social system really works and how the Soviet people cope with it. This study is based on the first comprehensive survey of life in the USSR since the Harvard Project over thiry-three years ago. The essays contained analyze the variations in attitude and behaviour reflected in the findings of the Soviet Interview Project, a five-year investigation of contemporary daily life in the USSR. The survey involved interviewing thousands of recent emigrants from the USSR to the United States as a means of learning about their former day-to-day lives. Some aspects of this survey dealt with areas the Soviets themselves had never investigated, so the data were not, and indeed still are not, available even in unpublished Soviet sources. This study of a large volume of firsthand observations is extremely valuable to anyone interested in the inner workings and behavioural dynamics of the contemporary Soviet social system.

Foreword Joseph S. Berliner; Part I. Introduction: 1. History, method, and the problem of bias James R. Millar; 2. Quality of life: subjective measures of relative satisfaction James R. Millar and Elizabeth Clayton; Part II. Politics: Sources of Regime Support: 3. Politics, generations, and change in the USSR Donna Bahry; 4. Political beliefs of the Soviet citizen: sources of support for regime norms Brian D. Silver; 5. The attentive public for Soviet science and technology Linda L. Lubrano; Part III. Work: Economic/Demographic Trends: 6. Inequality of earnings, household income, and wealth in the Soviet Union in the 1970s Aaron Vinokur and Gur Ofer; 7. The life course of Soviet women born 1905–1960 Barbara A. Anderson; 8. Productivity, slack, and time theft in the Soviet economy Paul R. Gregory; Part IV. Life: Social Status, Ethnic Relations, and Mobilized Participation: 9. Perceptions of social status in the USSR Michael Swafford; 10. Nationality policy and ethnic relations in the USSR Rasma Karklins; 11. Mobilized participation and the nature of the Soviet dictatorship William Zimmerman; Appendixes; Glossary; General bibliography of Soviet Interview project publications; Index.

Politics, work, and daily life in the USSR is designed to illustrate how the Soviet social system really works and how the Soviet people cope with it. The essays contained analyze the variations in attitude and behaviour reflected in the findings of the Soviet Interview Project, a five-year investigation of contemporary daily life in the USSR.