A Scholars' Examination of the Soviet System

The pictures on this page and on page five were taken by Allen H. Kassof, a graduate student fellow at the Russian Research Center, on his recent trip to the Soviet Union.

What is life really like in the Soviet system?

For almost a year now, individuals have been permitted to enter Russia and to do a limited amount of traveling. These people have duly made notes and reported back to the western world their findings. But they have always been individual impressions, based more on chance interviews and meetings than on systematic research.

This summer, however, three members of the Russian Research Center published a report entitled "How the Soviet System Works." It is based on the first large-scale study of attitudes and life-experiences of Soviet citizens--some 3,000 of them--and was conducted by the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, with the support of the U.S. Air Force. It is the first scholarly approach to the subject.

All the Soviet citizens interviewed left Russia during and after World War II. Most of them were moved out of their homeland involuntarily by the Germans as prisoners of war or as workers. The mass-interview techniques employed by the Projects are not used, or permitted, inside Russia.

Co-authors of the report are: Raymond A. Bauer, lecturer on Social Psychology; Alex Inkeles, lecturer on Sociology; and Clyde K.M. Kluckhohn, professor of Anthropology.

Here, in brief, are the main points of the report:

The former citizens of the USSR express "intense hatred" for the people in power and for the Communist Party.

In the USSR, they lived in fear of "the terror" of sudden arrest by secret police. They resent the "politicalization" of all aspects of life.

Next to the police terror, the system of collective farms is resented most, both by city dwellers and by peasants. The peasant is the "angry man" of the system. The manual workers share the peasants' feelings, but are "less intense and resentful."

But the report goes considerably beyond these generalizations. Published by the Harvard University Press it discusses specific aspects of the Soviet System. What, in short, is life really like for the man or woman living under the Soviet System? Here, in more detail, are some of the report's findings:

Jobs

"The work situation in the Soviet Union ranges from one of frustration and dissatisfaction for the manual groups to one of gratification for the members of the intelligentsia and the white-collar workers."

"The level of pay was the strongest factor determining the attractiveness of of a job (to the emigres)." But "the most desirable jobs were those that paid the most and were simultaneously dangerous (politically)."

Intelligentsia and white-collar employees generally were satisfied with their pay, liked their work (82 percent of the intelligentsia, 74 percent of the employees), and found their working environment pleasant. But they resented others being advanced beyond them on political grounds.

Ordinary workers and peasants (two-thirds of them) did not enjoy their work, did not regard their jobs as having prestige, and said they were underpaid.

The peasant expressed "inexorable opposition to the regimentation" of the of the collective farm; "he wants more time to work on his private garden plot, but beyond that he wants passionately to return to a system of private farming."

For some citizens, especially among the upper classes, their work became an "inner migration" from the hard facts of Soviet life. They lost themselves in their work.

The overwhelming majority of all groups reported that the attitude of their co-workers was friendly and "friendly personal relations were one of the rewarding and alleviating features of Soviet life."

Friendship

Despite the satisfaction the refugees said they got from warm, friendly relations with people around them, there were constant complaints "about mutual suspicion and protestations that 'you couldn't trust anybody.'"

"The desire to express pent-up feelings impels the individual to seek out confidants. The fear of talking makes him less likely to talk. The result is not a cessation of confidences, but rather the development of techniques of screening and assessing people."

Schooling

"The upper classes get a great deal of direct satisfaction from their school experiences...and see the schools as training them for a specific life career."

"The lower classes are less sanguine than the upper classes about their opportunities for education. To some extent, their optimism on this score seems to be increasing with the expansion of the Soviet educational system.

"It remains to be seen, however. whether apparent trends toward more rigid social stratification will not make it even more difficult for the lower classes to get higher education."

Family Life

Family life is to some extent for everyone "the final refuge from hardships of Soviet life and from Soviet politics."

"The chief sources of frustration in the enjoyment of family life are: conflict between parents and children over the political beliefs of one or another member of the family; lack of privacy because of inadequate housing; irritability of family members because of poor material conditions and anxiety over situations outside the family; lack of time to spend together because of excessive fatigue or because of the amount of time spent at work and shopping. Thus, the family is, to some extent, a refuge from these external events, but these events in themselves put a strain on family life."

"The Tempo"

There is general dissatisfaction with the pace of life, which they call "the tempo."

"Complaints concerning the 'tempo' involved high work norms, overtime (without pay, usually, for white-collar workers), long and difficult hours spent in transit to and from work, compulsory attendance at meetings outside regular working hours, precious time spent queuing up for scarce goods and strict laws of labor discipline which made one liable to strong penalties for being late to work."

The picture of satisfaction and dissatisfaction in the Soviet is a changing one, the authors note, and "so are the expectations and aspirations of succeeding generations of Soviet citizens.

"The youngest people in the Soviet population take for granted many de- privations and more politicalization of their lives than do the older people."

With this picture of how life looks to the Soviet citizen, and with scores of detailed reports from emigres on the organization and workings of various institutions--factories, collective farms, courts, schools, the army, the bureaucracy, and others--the behavioral scientists sought for a series of basic themes in the working of the system. For this, they draw on the observations of other American students of the Soviet and on Soviet materials, as well as on the interview data.

Here, in brief, is the kind of pattern they found:

1. While the long-range goals are fixed--strengthening the present Soviet structure and creating a Communist world under Soviet leadership--there is flexibility in short-range action.

The ruling group emphasizes "rational planning" in its propaganda, but it often "plays by ear" and muddles.

Rigidity and Flexibility

"There have been, from a shorter-range point of view, enough sudden alternations in both domestic and foreign policy, both between rigidity and flexibility and between drastically contrasting courses of policy and action, to justify naming 'cyclical behavior' one of the most distinctive operating characteristics of the Soviet system.

"If the regime should at any time be lured into tightening controls over such mechanisms too drastically, the system would probably soon be in trouble."

The authors conclude:

"Our pessimistic finding is that the new regime can gain much more solid popular support if it supplies more consumer goods and better housing, eases up on the terror, makes some concessions to the peasants, and relieves somewhat the frantic pace at which all the population has been driven.

"Such a change of policy would not only alleviate many of the day-to-day grievances of the citizen, but also change his basic image of the regime as a harsh and depriving force."This propaganda poster was pinned on a Moscow school's bulletin board. The large letters say "I could not study, so I sold newspapers." In small print it goes on to say: "Study is an unattainable dream for children living in capitalist countries. In such large countries as America, England, and France, one must pay for tuition and therefore almost no new schools are ever built. In Africa, in the southern regions of the Sudan, there is only one school student per 2,000 children. In Indonesia, altogether 3,000,000 children do not study."