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.

James R. Millar (Edited by)

9780521348904, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 30 October 1987

440 pages, 16 b/w illus. 101 tables
23.4 x 15.3 x 2.4 cm, 0.618 kg

'Professor Millar and his colleagues have rendered the field of Soviet studies a signal service by systematically investigating the attitudes, values, and life histories of a large sample of 'Third Wave' émigrés. Their findings help to clarify some of the most hotly disputed analytical issues in the field. All of the contributions to this volume will repay careful reading, and some of them will undoubtedly become classics in the field.' Jeremy R. Azrael, The RAND Corporation

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areas the Soviets themselves had never investigated, so the data were not, and indeed still are not, available even in unpublished Soviet sources.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.

Subject Areas: Economic systems & structures [KCS]