Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-fnpn6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-29T03:50:23.316Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Society Transformed? Rethinking the Social Roots of Perestroika

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Donna Bahry*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of California, Davis

Extract

Since the early days of perestroika, explanations for the Soviet opening to reform have emphasized the critical role of post-Stalin social transformation. Rising levels of education, changing patterns of social mobility and increasing urbanization seemed to create a new set of values and expectations by 1985 at odds with the Soviet system's traditional controls. If the initiative for restructuring came from the upper reaches of the political hierarchy, the pressures for change appeared to come from below. In contrast, assessments since the Soviet collapse have been more mixed. With the costs of reform mounting, calls for an “iron hand” and local resistance to market mechanisms suggest doubts about both capitalism and democracy: the results of Russia's April 1993 referendum seemed to be an endorsement of radical reform but only a minority of eligible voters actually approved Yeltsin's program; and survey data a few months earlier had indicated public support for a new coup in Moscow. Either the grand social and political transformation that unleashed perestroika was quickly reversed or its impact was exaggerated.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. On the first question, “Do you trust the President of Russia, Boris N. Yeltsin?” 58.7% of those voting said yes; but when the vote is weighted for turnout, then Yeltsin received a “yes” from only 37.7% of eligible voters. Similarly, on the second question, “Do you approve of the socio-economic policies carried out by the President and Government of the Russian Federation since 1992?” the percentages were 53.0 and 34.0 respectively. Calculated from the voting returns in Rossiiskaiagazeta (19 May 1993) : 2.

2. In one 1992 poll for Russian television, some 58% of respondents indicated that they would support a new putsch; 68% thought an authoritarian government would mean a higher standard of living, and 65% thought it would mean a lower crime rate (cited in RFE/RL Research Report 1 [17 July 1992] : 80).

3. “Regime Transition in Communist Systems : The Soviet Case, ” Soviet Economy 6 (1990) : 160-90.

4. Inkeles, Alex and Bauer, Raymond, The Soviet Citizen : Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1959 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Lucian W., Pye, “Political Science and the Crisis of Authoritarianism,” American Political Science Review 84 (1990) : 319.Google Scholar

6. Throughout this paper, I use the terms “values, ” “attitudes” and “preferences” interchangeably. In all cases, they refer to fundamental beliefs about the desired relationship between state and society. They reflect what Inkeles and Bauer viewed as the “system.” The “regime, ” in contrast, referred to the leaders and institutions responsible for day-to-day administration. Cf. David, Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York : Wiley, 1965 Google Scholar; and “A Re-Assessment of the Concept of Political Support, ” British Journal of Political Science 5 (October 1975) : 435–57.Google Scholar

7. An earlier, non-quantitative analysis of Harvard Project findings was presented in Raymond A. Bauer, Alex Inkeles and Clyde Kluckhohn, How the Soviet System Works. (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1956 Google Scholar.

8. The Soviet Citizen, 397.

9. This generation gap in support for the system was also emphasized by Harvard Project respondents themselves : many noted explicitly that it was the young people in the USSR who favored the Soviet order.

10. Rossi, Alice S., Generational Differences in the Soviet Union (New York : Arno Press, 1980), 295–97Google Scholar. This was a dissertation, based on data from the Harvard Project and completed in 1957; it was later published in Arno Press's dissertation series.

11. Younger interviewees reportedly had a rebellious streak, and many were disillusioned over the difference between what they were taught about the Soviet system as children and what they experienced of it as adults. Harvard Project researchers concluded, though, that the young simply came to accept Soviet reality and accommodate to the system (Bauer, et al., How the Soviet System Works, 115-16).

12. Inkeles and Bauer report, for example, that questions about parents’ influence on children's career choices reflected a substantial shift. Cohorts raised after the revolution were encouraged to give more emphasis to self-expression and self-determination; earlier generations had been encouraged to choose according to family traditions. Similarly, those in non-manual occupations reported much less emphasis on traditional values (The Soviet Citizen, 226-28).

13. Rossi, Generational Differences, 363-64.

14. Walter, Connor, “Dissent in a Complex Society,” Problems of Communism 22, no. 2 (1973) : 40–55Google Scholar; “Generations and Politics in the USSR, ” Problems of Communism 24, no. 5 (1975) : 20-31; Seweryn, Bialer, Stalin's Successors : Leadership, Stability, and Change in the Soviet Union (New York : Cambridge University Press, 1980.Google Scholar

15. John, Bushnell, “The ‘New Soviet Man’ Turns Pessimist,” Survey 24, no. 2 (1980) : 1–18Google Scholar; Gail W., Lapidus, “Society Under Strain,” The Washington Quarterly, 6 (Spring 1983) : 2947.Google Scholar

16. Moshe, Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon : A Historical Interpretation (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1988 Google Scholar; Blair, Ruble, “The Soviet Union's Quiet Revolution,” in George W. Breslauer, ed., Can Gorbachev's Reforms Succeed? (Berkeley : Berkeley-Stanford Program in Soviet Studies and Center for Slavic and East European Studies, 1990)Google Scholar.

17. S. Frederick Starr, “Prospects for Stable Democracy in Russia” (Columbus : Mershon Center Occasional Paper, Ohio State University, 1991)Google Scholar; Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon.

18. Hough, Jerry F., Soviet Leadership in Transition (Washington : Brookings Institution, 1980.Google Scholar

19. Blair, Ruble, “The Social Dimensions of Perestroyka ,” Soviet Economy 3 (1987) : 171–83Google Scholar. Remington ( “Regime Transitions ” ) contended that it was not the progress of modernization but its discontinuities that prompted change. Higher education, for example, had swelled far more rapidly than the job market warranted, and had thus led to substantial underemployment.

20. G Breslauer, eorge W., “On the Adaptability of Soviet Welfare-State Authoritarianism,” in Karl W. Ryavec, ed., Soviet Society and the Communist Party (Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 1978), 325 Google Scholar; Breslauer, , Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders : Building Authority in Soviet Politics (Boston : Allen and Unwin, 1982.Google Scholar

21. Bushnell, “The ‘New Soviet Man’ ” ; and Lapidus, “Society Under Strain. ”

22. Victor, Zaslavsky, The Neo-Stalinist State : Class, Ethnicity and Consensus in Soviet Society (Armonk : M. E. Sharpe, 1982).Google Scholar

23. Bialer, Stalin's Successors; Hough, Soviet Leadership in Transition; Donna, Bahry, “Politics, Generations and Change in the USSR,” in James R. Millar, ed., Politics, Work and Daily Life in the Soviet Union (New York : Cambridge University Press, 1987), 6199.Google Scholar

24. Jeffrey W., Hahn, “Continuity and Change in Russian Political Culture,” British Journal of Political Science 21 (1991) : 393421.Google Scholar

25. Reinhard, Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship : Studies of Our Changing Social Order (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1977), 6.Google Scholar

26. James R. Millar and Elizabeth Clayton, “Quality of Life : Subjective Measures of Relative Satisfaction, ” in Politics, Work and Daily Life, 31-60; and Brian D. Silver, “Political Beliefs of the Soviet Citizen : Sources of Support for Regime Norms, ” in Politics, Work and Daily Life, 100-41.

27. Stephen, White, “Continuity and Change in Soviet Political Culture : An Emigre Study,” Comparative Political Studies 11 (October 1978) : 381-95Google Scholar; Political Culture and Soviet Politics (New York : St. Martin's Press, 1979); Zvi Gitelman, “Soviet Political Culture : Insights from Jewish Emigres, ” Soviet Studies 29 (1977) : 543-64.

28. White, “Continuity and Change ” ; and Political Culture.

29. Donna Bahry, “Politics, Generations and Change in the USSR ” ; William Zimmerman, “Mobilized Participation and the Nature of the Soviet Dictatorship, ” in Politics, Work and Daily Life in the Soviet Union; and Silver, “Political Beliefs. ”

30. James L. Gibson, Raymond M. Duch and Kent L. Tedin, “Democratic Values and the Transformation of the Soviet Union, ” The Journal of Politics 54 (May 1992) : 329-71; and Duch, Gibson and, “Emerging Democratic Values in Soviet Political Culture,” in Arthur M. Miller, William M. Reisinger and Vicki L. Hesli, eds., Public Opinion and Regime Change : The New Politics of Post-Soviet Societies (Boulder : Westview Press, 1993), 6994, esp. p. 80Google Scholar; Arthur Miller, “In Search of Regime Legitimacy, ” in Public Opinion and Regime Change, 95-123. Gibson and Duch, for example, note that only a minority of respondents in a 1990 survey of the USSR preferred order over freedom, or would sacrifice freedom of thought, speech or protest to protect society from different or extremist views ( “Emerging Democratic Values, ” 77). They also report that over 60% of their interviewees endorsed a multiparty system (ibid., 83). Miller finds that, in a 1990 sample of Russia and Ukraine, more than half of the respondents preferred an orderly society over the freedom to demonstrate, and just over half thought that multiple parties would be good for the system ( “In Search of Regime Legitimacy, ” 100-01).

31. Ada Finifter and Ellen, Mickiewicz, “Redefining the Political System of the USSR : Mass Support for Political Change,” American Political Science Review 86 (1992) : 857–74Google Scholar.

32. See Gibson, Duch and Tedin, “Democratic Values ” ; Finifter and Mickiewicz, “Redefining the Political System ” ; and Hahn, “Continuity and Change. ”

33. Silver finds that higher education generally means less support for state ownership and control in heavy industry and agriculture, or state provision of medical care ( “Political Beliefs, ” 125). Duch reports that the more the education, the greater the support for a combined measure of price reform, individual responsibility in the job market and private ownership ( “Tolerating Economic Reform : Popular Support for Transition to a Free Market in the Former Soviet Union, ” American Political Science Review [forthcoming]). Finifter and Mickiewicz show that 51% of their sample believed that “the state and government should be mainly responsible for the well-being and success of people, ” while 49% believed that “people should look out for themselves, decide for themselves what to do for success in life.” And the higher the education, the more people in their sample preferred state/government rather than individual responsibility (Finifter and Mickiewicz, 859, 869).

34. Darrell Slider, Vladimir Magun and Vladimir Gimpel'son, “Public Opinion on Privatization : Republic Differences, ” Soviet Economy 7 (July-September 1991) : 256-75.

35. The survey asked for respondents’ nationality, but did not ask them to identify the specific place where they had resided in the USSR. However, many of their descriptions of work and home life referred to homes in Russia and Ukraine.

36. The recoding was conducted as a “blind” process, i.e., coders could refer to the original HP categories but not the actual results; the recoded data could then be compared with the original as a control. The rates of agreement were extremely high. See the description in Donna Bahry, “Methodological Report on Recoding of the Harvard Project Life History Interviews, ” Soviet Interview Project Working Papers, no. 46 (1988).

37. Cf. views on civil liberties in The Soviet Citizen, 248.

38. The results are reported in Edward, Wasiolek, Responses by Former Soviet Citizens to a Questionnaire vs. Life History Interview, Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, Report to the Director (Maxwell Air Force Base, mimeo, July 1954)Google Scholar.

39. Respondents in the Life History interviews proved more inclined to give answers that would flatter American interviewers and themselves, and they tended to be somewhat more negative toward the USSR. Also, respondents were more likely in person to admit that they had belonged to the Komsomol. It appears that the LH data were the more accurate on this count : data from the LH interviews on Komsomol membership by age cohort and gender are virtually identical with later surveys

40. Here, only those people who were at least 18 years old in their “last normal period of life in the USSR” are included in the analysis.

41. I report fewer of the SIP findings here, since much of the data has already been analyzed elsewhere.

42. Donna Bahry, “Surveying Soviet Emigrants : Political Attitudes and Ethnic-Bias, ” Soviet Interview Project Working Papers, no. 50 (1989). Similarly, Russian and Ukrainian interviewees in the Harvard Project were at odds over nationality policy and ethnic relations in Ukraine, but they had virtually the same values when the questions turned to economic organization, individual rights or social welfare.

43. Harvard Project respondents, who had emigrated and had been exposed to systems of private ownership of industry in the west, continued to endorse basic government controls of major economic sectors a la NEP. And although they had seen the greater political freedom in the west, they were by no means anxious to import it wholesale to the USSR. Rather, they preferred a benign state that would retain some political controls for the benefit of the citizenry. The same was true for interviewees in the Soviet Interview Project : respondents rejected some political controls, such as residence permits, but accepted others, such as state controls on the media.

44. Harvard Project researchers did discover some emigration effects, based on country of destination : while educated and intellectual/professional emigres in the US and Germany gave virtually identical responses, less educated, blue-collar respondents differed in the two countries on one crucial set of questions. Those in the US were even more positive about the Soviet welfare state than were emigres living in Germany. Inkeles and Bauer reasoned that adaptation may have been more difficult for the US group, and that the respondents in Germany would more closely reflect sentiments inside the USSR (The Soviet Citizen, 58-59).

45. See Table 1 and Rossi, Generational Differences, 295. The recoded data on ownership in light industry do turn out to be somewhat different from the original HP results, apparently because the question was answered by only a small subset of respondents in the Life History interviews.

46. That is, the same question posed in different ways evoked much the same answer. This is not to argue that question wording, order or other issues of survey design have no impact; rather, their effects need to be examined question-by-question.

47. Actually, Inkeles and Bauer, and Rossi used several different age breaks to measure generational differences. In some parts of their analysis, respondents were divided into two groups, under 35 years old and 35 or older; in other parts of the analysis, the age break is 40 or 45. Rossi also relies on finer categories, based on 10-year intervals, and that is the approach I use here.

48. None of the Harvard Project materials indicated how occupational class had been coded. Thus the occupation-based categories in The Soviet Citizen could not be replicated precisely enough to make them the basis for the entire analysis. Harvard Project papers deposited in the Harvard Archives did include a partial list of the actual codes used for some respondents and, judging from these, assignment to particular categories was closely related to a respondent's education.c

49. See, for example, White's “Continuity and Change. ”

50. Rossi noted that the high rate of approval for state control might in fact be simply an endorsement of the traditional values of the tsarist state. However, the oldest and most traditional elements of the population were least supportive of a broad state role, and that suggests that it was not simply “tradition” which led people to support public ownership.

51. For example, a Russian chief bookkeeper from Rostov (LH case 1493) and a kolkhoznitsa from Poltava (LH case 1719) offered essentially the same answer on government economic controls : “I would keep state ownership of heavy industry, mines, factories (large ones), railways, utilities…. Small and medium factories I think the government could give to cooperatives or rent them to individuals…. I would liquidate the collective farms and ‘sovkhoz’ [sic] and would promote individual ownership of the land” (LH case 1493).

52. David Hoffman offers archival evidence on the hostility toward collectivization in “The ‘Peasantization’ of the Soviet Working Class : Peasant In-Migration, Political Socialization, and the Decline of Labor Protest in the 1930s, ” International Working Papers Series 1-91-16 (The Hoover Institution, 1991). Merle Fainsod provides a more detailed description in Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1958), 238-305. ;

53. Stephen White's interviews with emigrants to Israel in 1976 show a pattern very similar to that in the Harvard Project and the Times Mirror surveys : there was near-unanimous agreement that heavy industry should be in state hands and that agriculture should be private. See “Continuity and Change, ” 386-87. Questions in the Soviet Interview Project asked people whether heavy industry and agriculture should be exclusively state-run or exclusively private, with answers arrayed on a 7-point scale of 1= private, 7 = state. For heavy industry, the average score was 4.5 (among 1674 respondents); and for agriculture, it was 2.2. Support for state ownership in heavy industry thus appears to be lower than in the other surveys, in part because of question format. To measure the effect, I included the same question in a “split-halves” experiment in a 1992 survey of Russia (Russia-92) : a random half of the respondents were asked the question using a 7-point scale, and the other half were asked the same question in the format used in the 1991 Times Mirror survey. While the data are still being cleaned, preliminary evidence suggests that the 7-point scales did have some influence on the overall level of support for state ownership : people tended to choose answers toward the middle of the scale rather than the end-points. However, the question format did not appear to influence the relationships analyzed here among different issues and different generations and levels of education.

54. The question in the 1991 Times Mirror “Pulse of Europe” survey used a slightly different term ( “fermerstvo” rather than “sel'skoe khoziaistvo ” ) for agriculture and this appears to skew the answers somewhat toward the private end of the scale. A similar question asked in a USIA-ROMIR study of Russia in June 1992 revealed that roughly one third of respondents would keep agriculture in state hands. These two surveys also offer some additional evidence on the effect of question formats. In the “Pulse of Europe” survey, the questions on ownership of the means of production posed two possible answers, “mainly state” or “mainly private ” ; answers of “mixed” or “both” could be volunteered but were not read to respondents. The June 1992 USIA-ROMIR survey offered four answer categories : exclusively state, mainly state, mainly private or exclusively private. In the latter, 82% of respondents would keep heavy industry “exclusively” or “mainly” under state ownership; the corresponding percentage for the Times Mirror study was 84.5%. I would like to thank Steve Grant and Richard Dobson for discussing the USIA-ROMIR findings with me.

55. The same point, that acceptance of state ownership in heavy industry did not preclude support for reform of other sectors, can also be tested by estimating the correlation between the answers. As Table 12 shows, there was no connection between them.

56. Other surveys suggest that people also judge the need for state versus private ownership based on the size of enterprises, preferring to keep larger ones under state control. See e.g., Doktorov, Boris Z., Perspektivy razvitiia predprinimatel'stva v SSSR (Moscow : Mezhdunarodnyi tsentr obshchechelovecheskikh tsennostei, 1991), 16.Google Scholar

57. This is also borne out by the results of a survey of economic values by sociologists at the St. Petersburg branch of the Institute of Sociology. Respondents with higher education were markedly less supportive of the justification for collectivization, the termination of NEP, equalization of wages or of detailed planning. See Safronov, V. V., “Massovye ekonomicheskie predstavleniia : istoricheskii aspekt,” in Teoretikoempiricheskoe izuchenie ekonomicheskogo soznaniia na puti k tipologizatsii (Moscow : Institut sotsiologii Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk, 1992), 106Google Scholar. I am indebted to Boris Doktorov, of the St. Petersburg branch of the Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences, for bringing these findings to my attention.

58. It may be, of course, that this difference simply reflects the disparate samples. That is, the higher level of approval of state control in 1991 might simply mean that the workers and peasants in the Harvard Project sample were unusually negative toward the system. In fact, Inkeles and Bauer concluded that workers and peasants were the most hostile to the Soviet order. They constructed a “hostility index” to determine whether people would refuse to credit the regime even for its basic achievements in areas such as health care and cultural facilities; workers and peasants proved the least likely to say that there had been improvements in these areas. However, this measure is ambiguous; the achievements were in fact most visible and accessible to higher-status urban groups. Blue-collar strata were simply describing the reality of the pre-war Soviet system. Nor did the workers and peasants in the HP sample have experiences or backgrounds (such as a higher incidence of trouble with the Party or police) that would make them more negative toward the system than other interviewees. Note, too, that their criticisms of the economic system, especially of the collective farms, focused on the low wages, long hours and harsh working conditions. Since these were ameliorated under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the modest increase in support for state/collective farming makes sense.

59. The support for private farming might seem to be anomalous, given the numbers of surveys claiming to show public resistance to the idea. It appears that the questions here tap a willingness to endorse private initiative in the countryside; other issues, such as free purchase and sale of land, are more controversial.

60. Peter Reddaway, “The End of the Empire, ” New York Review of Books (7 November 1991) : 53-59.

61. However, once the collapse of the USSR became obvious, by the winter of 1991, “order” and maintenance of the USSR and/or unity was more salient than social welfare for the least educated and some older respondents (see Table 4). They still believed that the state should provide for its citizens (see Table 5b).

62. This part of the analysis rests on differences among occupational classes because the data on these questions for the Stalin era are available only from published Harvard Project results.

63. Since questions in the later survey asked about people in specific occupations, it might be that the answers reflect only judgments about those occupations and not the broader social categories named in the Harvard Project. However, a factor analysis of the SIP responses confirms that even when questions were asked about specific occupations, people tended to group them in broad class terms (the data are not shown). The results yield three factors, for “authorities” (Party, KGB, military), “workers, farmers, employees” (kolkhozniki, retail clerks, factory workers, doctors), and “professionals and intellectuals” (industrial managers, professors). Thus the question taps the same perceived social cleavages as did the comparable question in the Stalin era. Only doctors seem to defy this class divide, apparently because of their relatively low pay and longer hours, and the perceived value of their work.

64. In Russia-91, the questions about which groups received too much or too little included specific occupations, as asked earlier in SIP. The answers are similar, with a few differences : after the collapse of the consumer sector, more open corruption and rising inflation, retail sales clerks were no longer rated as being under-rewarded. And by late 1991, “obkom first secretary” was no longer a salient category. Instead, the survey asked about a “deputy to the Supreme Soviet ” ; people responded that deputies also received too much. In 1992, the questions referred to various social groups, such as peasants, workers, white-collar employees and so on. The results bear out the tendency for more highly educated respondents to want to raise rewards for professionals and to be less inclined to redistribute to manual classes.

65. See also the results in Millar and Clayton, “Quality of Life ” ; and Silver, “Political Beliefs. ”

66. Bahry, “Politics, Generations and Change. ”

67. Cf. Inkeles and Bauer, The Soviet Citizen, 246-48.

68. Many people, for example, wanted more and diverse sources of information. However, they also believed that the state should have its own media in order to explain its policies and educate the masses, and they wanted to insure that the government would punish people or newspapers that “spread false information and attack morals or the government” (LH case 1493).

69. Rossi suggests that some respondents may have interpreted the word “attack” literally, as an effort to overthrow the government by force. Yet the percentages on this question (roughly half of respondents would prevent such a group from meeting) are in line with others endorsing some limitation of individual rights.

70. Gibson and Duch, in “Emerging Democratic Values” (80), also find a mixed reaction to the question of controls over the media : in their 1990 survey of the European USSR, only 54% of respondents were willing to allow private radio, television and newspapers to coexist alongside state-owned ones.

71. Rossi shows that the young were more inclined to allow people to say things detrimental to the state. But they were less willing than others to allow meetings held to attack the government (Generational Differences, 304-5).

72. The same cleavages emerge in data on the late Brezhnev era (the data are not shown).

73. Given the relatively small sample from the Harvard Project, I report multiple measures of the level of significance for individual coefficients. Questions on social welfare are excluded from the regression analysis, since the raw data from the Stalin years are not available on these issues.

74. Note that each survey treated the issue of place of residence somewhat differently. Face sheets for the Harvard Project interviews included data on whether respondents had mostly lived in a village, a small, medium or large city, or a combination of these. Given the upheavals of the wars, the early Soviet period, collectivization and the like, most people had lived in several very different settings. SIP included questions on the exact place of last residence; and the Pulse of Europe Survey included a field-coded question on respondents’ current place of residence. I also ran the regression analysis using residence in a rural area rather than a major urban one. The results prove to be essentially the same as in Tables 10 and 11, with rural inhabitants somewhat more in favor of state controls over the economy and over individual rights; urban residents are less so.

75. I also included a measure of occupational status in some of the analysis (i.e., a dummy variable with a “ 1 ” if a person was employed in a professional or intellectual field, and a “0” otherwise). But this proved difficult to interpret. Occupation was often so closely connected with education that it washed out in the statistical analysis. And in the Times Mirror survey, “occupation” was not asked of nearly a quarter of respondents then on pension; this would mean dropping virtually all pension-age respondents from the statistical analysis.

76. In the Harvard Project, it seemed to be the combination of age and education that mattered. When I included an interaction term for the older and less educated cohort (born before 1900 and with less than complete secondary education), they turned out to be significantly (p < .05) less positive than others toward state ownership in sector A.

77. The impact of cohort differences on acceptance of state control in light industry in the Stalin era are not as clear. My analysis reveals that there were no signif icant age effects (see Table 10 and note 44). This may be due to the fact that relatively few people responded. Data from the PPQ suggested that the younger the interviewee, the more supportive of state control, although the effect of age varied from one social group to another. On the other hand, higher social status meant less support (Rossi, Generational Change, 296).

78. Inkeles and Bauer, and Rossi suggest that young peoples’ negative views of collectivization were in many cases acquired in the displaced persons camps, based on the stories they had heard. Yet many respondents in the 30-to-40 age group did see collectivization for themselves, making them doubt that it had been worth the enormous costs. Younger people recounted stories they had heard from family and friends at home.

79. They were somewhat more inclined to grant greater freedom of speech (see Table 9). Note, though, that the question on speech is open to different interpretations, since it asked whether a communist orator should be allowed to speak undisturbed. It may be that people were responding to the fact that the speaker was a communist when they were judging whether to let him speak.

80. Rossi emphasizes the same point in her analysis of PPQ data : differences by age and social status on questions of free assembly, for example, are at odds with those for freedom of speech (Generational Differences, 303-6).

81. One reason may simply be the increase in levels of education over time. But this does not seem to be the case : the correlations among issues hold within each level of education.

82. Data on the Brezhnev era reveal much the same pattern of correlations among issues as under Gorbachev. These correlations—or the lack of them under Stalin— were not limited to the specific questions listed in Table 12. The same patterns also obtain on other items related to state economic and political controls. Nor are the increasing correlations among individual questions over time a product of changing question content or format. The surveys here included multiple questions with different formats and the results are similar whatever the formulation. Thus the changes in individual consistency cannot be attributed to the questions themselves.

83. Cf. Starr, “Prospects for Stable Democracy. ”

84. Cf. Ruble, “The Soviet Union's Quiet Revolution ” ; and Ellen Carnaghan, “A Revolution in Mind : Russian Political Attitudes and the Origins of Democratization under Gorbachev, ” Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1992.

85. See Bahry, Donna and Silver, Brian, “Public Perceptions and the Dilemmas of Party Reform in the USSR,” Comparative Political Studies 23 (1990) : 171209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

86. Inkeles and Bauer were far more careful in their conclusions than common interpretations of their work generally acknowledge. They did emphasize the basic acceptance of many regime norms, something that was unexpected given the nature of their sample. But they also devoted a good deal of attention to the limits on public support.

87. Inkeles and Bauer argued that the Soviet system had raised the aspirations of the new and educated cohorts, and then tied them to the regime's goals. This made control over careers and employment even more of a lever to insure conformity (The Soviet Citizen, 288-90).

88. Katerina Clark offers a similar argument about generational change among the intelligentsia : the new generations who emerged under Stalin as the arbiters of intellectual life had “reduced intellectual horizons” given the isolation that accompanied Stalin's revolution. Unlike their counterparts in the 1920s, they had less experience or knowledge of the world beyond Soviet borders. See “The ‘Quiet Revolution’ in Soviet Intellectual Life, ” in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch and Richard Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1991), 210-30.

89. Note, though, that the Times Mirror survey's very small number of respondents born up to 1910 should make us cautious in interpreting the results for this cohort in the Gorbachev era.

90. Older generations experienced the same events; but as Inkeles and Bauer noted, they found ways to accommodate the contradictions.

91. See e.g., Breslauer, “On the Adaptability ” ; Millar, James R., “The Little Deal : Brezhnev's Contribution to Acquisitive Socialism,” in Terry L. Thompson and Richard Sheldon, eds., Soviet Society and Culture : Essays in Honor of Vera S. Dunham (Boulder : Westview, 1988), 319.Google Scholar

92. P eter, Hauslohner, “Gorbachev's Social Contract,” Soviet Economy 3 (1987) : 5489 Google Scholar; Janine, Ludlam, “Reform and the Redefinition of the Social Contract under Gorbachev,” World Politics 43 (January 1991) : 284312.Google Scholar

93. L inda, Cook, “Brezhnev's Social Contract and the Gorbachev Reforms,” Soviet Studies 44, no. 1 (1992) : 37–56Google Scholar. For one outline of the strategy, see Tatyana, Zaslavskaya, The Second Socialist Revolution : An Alternative Soviet Strategy (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1990.Google Scholar

94. Questions asked in the SIP I survey showed that people did not necessarily ascribe goods shortages or other economic problems to public ownership per se. They tended to view such lapses in terms of planning failures or other errors.

95. The Harvard Project did find that younger and more highly educated cohorts had a greater desire for autonomy on the job and for more creative or meaningful work, values typically associated with modernizing society. Yet the young and the college-educated were not demonstrably more critical toward state controls (except in agriculture).

96. Cf. Hough, Soviet Leadership in Transition. It may also be that the system's instrumental view of education, with its emphasis on service to the state, reinforced the perception of a system in decline. If people with college-level or higher schooling were expected to help identify and solve social and economic ills, they would be most likely to experience frustration over problems that did not respond to traditional cures.

97. See e.g., Peter H., Smith, “Crisis and Democracy in Latin America,” World Politics 43 (1991) : 608–34Google Scholar; and Karen L., Remmer, “New Wine or Old Bottlenecks? The Study of Latin American Democracy,” Comparative Politics 23, no. 4 (1991) : 479–95.Google Scholar

98. Robert H., Dix, “The Breakdown of Authoritarian Regimes,” Western Political Quarterly 35 (1982) : 554–73.Google Scholar